^        tihvaxy  of  t:he  t:heolo0ical  ^tminavy 


PRINCETON  •  NEW  JERSEY 


•a^^D* 


BL  51  .M473  1895 
Meakin,  Frederick,  1848- 

1923. 
Nature  and  deity 


NATURE  AND  DEITY 


A  STUDY  OP 


RELIGION  AS  A  QUEST  OF 

THE  IDEAL 


BY 


FREDERICK  MEAKIN 


How  charming  is  divine  philosophy! — Milton 


CHICAGO 
CHARLES  H.  KP:RR  Sc  COMPANY 
175  Monroe  Street 


Copyright,  1895, 
By  FREDERICK  MEAKIN. 


INTRODUCTORY. 

The  following  essay  is  an  attempt  to  find  in  the 
constitution  of  our  humanity  and  in  our  general  rela- 
tions to  nature  tlie  grounds  of  a  religious  philosophy 
considered  as  the  general  philosophy  of  life. 

The  point  of  view  is  that  of  pure  naturalism.  And 
no  need  arises,  within  the  scope  of  this  inquiry,  for 
the  discussion  of  the  various  theories  of  knowincf  and 
being  which  have  vexed  philosophy  and  shaken  the 
foundations  of  religion.  Onlolog}',  epistemology, 
and  the  moot  questions  of  metaphysics,  have  no  di- 
rect bearing  upon  our  conclusions  in  their  main  drift ; 
and  realist  or  idealist,  theist,  theosophist,  or  agnos- 
tic, who  should  allow  that  the  power  which  gives 
form  and  force  to  the  law  of  life  has  given  us  also  a 
natural  means  for  the  interpretation  of  this  law  mi^ht, 
for  the  purposes  of  this  inquir}',  waive  the  consicicra- 
tion  of  ulterior  problems  and  search  with  us  fur  the 
natural  grounds  of  such  vital  or  religious  law.  At 
any  rate,  we  look  no  further  than  nature  here  for  the 
basis  of  re-ligious  thouglit.  The  philosopliv  of  relig- 
ion is  conceived  as  a  form  of  naliu'al  piiilooophy. 

And  having  identitied  religion  with  the  rational  law 
of  life,  as  disclosed  in  the  specilic  charact(.'r  of  the 
being  with  wliieh  we  havr  brcn  enclnwcHJ  by  nature, 
we  lind  that  tlie  sjihere  of  rcbgion  includes  the  spliere 


6  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

of  morals  as  the  greater  includes  the  less.  Ethical  law 
is  but  a  part  of  the  law  of  life  as  a  whole.  In  so  far, 
therefore,  we  differ  from  those  who  would  expand 
the  content  of  ethics  so  as  to  include  all  conduct  or 
conscious  direction  of  life  whatever.  We  have  con- 
ceived the  theory  of  ethics,  distinctively,  as  the  funda- 
mental theory  of  associative  life, believing  that  the  laws 
commonly  recognized  as  moral  are  practically  limited 
to  the  requirements  of  organic  (not  necessarily  primi- 
tive) social  law.  Such  a  limitation  of  the  scope  of 
ethics,  however,  though  consistent  with  general  hab- 
its of  thought,  as  we  maintain,  and  an  aid  therefore 
to  effectiveness  of  treatment,  is  mainly  a  matter  of 
classification,  and  of  the  classification  of  phenomena, 
too,  which  cannot  be  marked  off  by  abrupt  or  definite 
lines.  The  vital  principle  fuses  and  unifies  all  the 
activities  of  life.  And  the  philosophy  of  life  would 
remain  the  same  even  if  we  should  include  the  whole 
of  life  within  the  sphere  of  ethics,  banishing  religion 
to  the  putative  sphere  of  the  supernatural.  The  rela- 
tions of  language  to  thought,  nevertheless,  are  so  inti- 
mate, and  conduct  depends  so  largely  upon  habit,  that 
old  names,  to  which  the  theorist  may  as  theorist  prop- 
erly be  indifferent,  ought  not  to  be  lightl}'  discarded 
in  matters  of  practice;  and,  unless  we  arbitrarily  ex- 
tend the  scope  of  morals,  a  term  more  comprehensive 
than  morality  is  needed  to  cover  the  entire  discipline 
and  conduct  of  life.  Such  a  term  we  have  ready  to 
hand  in  the  word  religion.  To  certain  extremists 
it  ma}^  seem  that  the  associations  inseparable  from  the 
name  arc    misleading,    or    even    vicious,  but    on    tl^e 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  7 

whole  more  will  be  lost,  we  believe,  than  can  be 
gained  by  the  excision  of  a  word  of  so  great  breadth 
and  inspirational  power.  Religion  is  a  word  which 
is  not  a  mere  word.      It  is  a  force. 

The  idealism  which  emerges  as  the  result  of  this 
inquiry,  and  into  which  religion  is  here  resolved, 
will  hardly  be  confounded,  after  what  has  been  said, 
with  philosophic  idealism,  or  the  system  of  thought 
which  resolves  all  being  into  forms  of  thought.  The 
questions  raised  by  idealism  as  a  philosophical  theory 
are  beside  the  aim  of  this  essay.  The  ideal  here 
represents  the  form  which  rational  conduct  contin- 
ually approximates,  and  is  contrasted  with  the  real, 
not  as  thought  is  contrasted  with  things,  but  as  the 
perfection  of  the  ideal  is  contrasted  with  its  incom- 
plete manifestation  in  the  real ;  and  the  actual  or  real 
which  should  perfectly  exemplify  the  type  would  be 
itself  the  ideal.  And  the  law  of  approximation  to 
the  type,  or  the  ideal  law,  is  implied  in  the  principles 
in  which  nature  universal  has  founded  the  nature  of 
our  humanity,  and  is  deepl}^  impressed,  in  part  at 
least,  upon  our  instincts.  It  appears,  in  one  of  its 
aspects,  as  the  moral  sense,  or  the  intuitive  sense  of 
right,  which  is  sometimes  made  the  ultimate  ground 
of  moral  distinctions.  A  theory  is  needed,  however, 
to  give  greater  certainty  and  consistency  to  the  sug- 
gestions of  this  moral  sense,  which  is  unequally  de- 
veloped in  dilTerent  minds,  and,  witli  the  practical 
advantages,  has  the  imperfections  of  an  instinct,  and 
to  reduce  its  deliveranc(^s,  if  possible, to  a  general  prin- 
cijile  or  law  which  shall    appeal  witli    paramount  an- 


8  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

thority  to  all  rational  minds.  Such  a  general  law, 
we  submit,  is  to  be  found  in  the  law  of  human  hap- 
piness or  well-being.  The  fundamental  precepts  of 
ethics  derive  their  authority,  we  maintain,  from  the 
fact  that  their  fulfillment  is  a  condition  indispensable 
to  that  complete  discharge  of  the  vital  functions  as 
a  whole  in  which  life  attains  its  happiest  consumma- 
tion and  most  perfect  form. 

This  most  perfect  life,  conceived  as  an  expression 
of  the  universal  life,  we  have  called  divine;  and  nat- 
ure in  her  ideal   aspect   generally    we    contemplate, 
in  like  manner,  as  nature   in    her   deity    or  divinity. 
Exception  may  be  taken  to   this  use  of  a  term  which 
might  be  supposed  to  have  no  place  in  a  merely  nat- 
vu^alistic  scheme.    But,  after  Spinoza,  no  justification 
is  needed.      Nature  and  deity  are  not  by  the  force  of 
the  terms  mutually   exclusive.      It  is  a  mere  incident 
of  theology  and  its  skeptical  counterpart,  so  to  speak, 
that  the  divine  should  now  be  expunged  from  nature 
and  relegated  to  the  domain, knowable  or  unknowable, 
of  the  non-natural  or  the  supernatural,    and  religious 
sentiment  has  never  perhaps    wholly  divested  nature 
of  the  divinity  with  which  she  was  associated   in  the 
antique  thought.      Christianity   itself,  from    Paul  the 
Apostle  down  to  Berkele}^  the  philosophizing  bishop, 
has  shown    distinctively   pantheistic   leanings.      The 
identification  of  the  divine  with  the   ideal  has,  more- 
over, gone  into  literature,  and    only   those    who    are 
violently  theistic,  or  those  who  are  as  yet  in  the  vio- 
lence of  their  reaction  from    theism,  will    see   a  nec- 
essary   incongruity  in  the  recognition  of  deity  in  the 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  9 

ideal  aspects  and  tendencies  discernible  in  the  general 
being  of  nature.  So  at  least  we  are  persuaded.  But 
if  a  man  will  insist  that  "religion''  and  "the  divine" 
are  but  the  perishable  terms  of  an  illusion  which 
must  one  day  be  dispelled,  the  natural  laws  which 
govern  the  quest  and  cultus  of  the  ideal  will  remain 
nevertheless  the  same,  and  will  remain  equally  au- 
thoritative, with  whatever  terms  associated,  in  deter- 
mining the  conduct  of  reasonable  men.  And  these 
are  the  laws  which  we  have  attempted  here  to  ration- 
alize or  trace  to  their  general  grounds  in  the  natural 
scheme  of  things. 

For  the  rest,  the  essay  must  be  left  to  the  judg- 
ment of  the  reader  for  what  it  is  worth,  with  the  sug- 
gestion, only,  that  he  weigh  its  conclusions  more 
considerately  than  its  terms.  Its  language  is  general, 
since  it  is  addressed  to  no  particular  class,  unless 
such  as  are  willing  to  discuss  religious  topics  with 
the  freedom  which  they  assert  in  other  directions  of 
inquiry  may  be  called  a  class.  And  its  aim  is  con- 
structive rather  than  critical.  Criticism  of  old  sys- 
tems has  already  done  its  most  eilective  work.  It 
remains  now,  if  religion  shall  be  taken  still  in  any 
vital  sense,  to  refer  its  verities  to  the  ground  of  the 
natural  and  the  knowable,  on  the  one  hand,  and  to 
guard  it  from  moral  indilTcrentism,  on  the  other. 
And  "divine"  philosophy  may  in  fact,  we  are  con- 
vinced, be  presented  in  terms  of  a  natural  philosophy 
without  loss  of  moral  or  inspirational  force. 


NATURE  AND  DEITY. 


I. 


The  truth,  it  would  seem,  is  most  profitable,  not  for  instruction 
alone,  but  in  its  bearing  too  upon  life. — Aristotle:  Nichomachean 
Ethics.  X.   I. 

Under  the  stars,  or  by  the  mountains  or  the  sea, 
the  contemplative  mind,  escaping  the  fever  and  con- 
straint of  its  working-day  aims, is  conscious  of  a  deep 
affinity  with  the  power  and  being  of  the  natural  world. 
Nature  then,  that  to  our  conventionalized  thought  is 
a  mere  mechanic  mass  wanting  an  inner  original  drift, 
is  revealed  as  an  omnipresent  life,  a  perduring  vital 
energy,  of  which  man  himself  is  but  a  phase  and 
product.  A  common  principle  animates  all  being. 
But  seen  in  Nature's  vast  perspective,  how  fleeting 
and  contracted  is  man's  particular  being.  His  boldest 
thought  is  awed  by  her  infinitudes.  Nor  by  her  vast- 
er motions  or  her  starry  spaces  only  is  his  sense  op- 
pressed. A  blade  of  grass,  a  pebble,  the  merest  ripple 
that  breaks  the  surface  of  a  pool,  lures  his  thouglit 
into  a  sea  of  change  that  batlles  thought.  Nay,  the 
mind,  self-conscious  subject,  the  mind  which  thinks, 
finds  in  itself  a  world  (jf  causes,  relations,  laws,  as 
olijcctive  and  as  deep  and  strange  as  those  of  any  far- 
oil  world  or  system  of  worlds  beyond  the  limit  of  our 

11 


12  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

natural  vision.      Within  as  without  we  encounter  the 
mystery  of  being. 

And  the  sense  of  this  myster}^  it  may  be  conceded, 
is  an  element  of  the  religious  sense.  The  awe  which 
fills  the  soul  in  moments  of  religious  exaltation  would 
fail  or  vanish  were  the  universe  to  shrink  from  its  in- 
finitude to  the  small  compass  of  our  intelligence.  But 
religion  is  not  amazement  merely  or  blind  stupefac- 
tion. To  acquire  a  religious  value,  feeling  must  as- 
sume a  measure  of  consistency  and  form,  for  though 
the  depth  of  religious  feeling  may  obscure  the  formal 
or  intellectual  elements  of  religion,  the  feeling,  as  re- 
licrious,  can  not  be  defined  as  the  mere  recoil  of 
baffled  intelligence:  it  must  be  informed  b}^  some 
positive  idea.  Religious  ideas,  it  is  true,  are  vari- 
able, hard  to  hold  and  define.  As  they  are  inces- 
santly changing  and  expanding  with  the  giowth  of  the 
mind  and  the  shifting  of  the  mental  horizon, it  is  only 
in  their  more  general  content  or  intention  that  they 
are  likely  to  be  constant.  Such  pervading  intention, 
however,  it  seem.s  possible  to  trace.  A  certain  sub- 
stance or  positive  content  survives  the  long  process 
of  religious  change,  and  constitutes,  at  least  for  such 
stages  of  man's  religious  development  as  it  is  our 
purpose  to  consider,  what  we  ma}- fairly  assume  to  be 
characteristic  or  essential  in  religion — its  underljnng 
thought  and  its  underlying  aim. 

If  we  separate  religion  from  its  mere  ceremonial 
or  uninformed  habit,  its  vital  underlying  thought  is 
the  idea  of  power,in  nature  or  through  nature  in  some 
way   made   manifest,  guiding   from    within    or    from 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  1 3 

without  the  operations  of  nature, and  determining  also 
our  human  lot.  Such  a  thought  has  its  seat  deep  in 
the  sources  of  feeling, and  is  found  in  intimate  relation 
with  the  most  significant  acts  of  life.  In  serious 
minds  it  is  interwoven  with  every  purpose  of  life. 
Religion  appears  on  its  practical  side,  accordingly, 
as  a  paramount  aim:  an  aim,  that  is  to  say,  inspired 
by  the  hopes  or  the  fears  associated  with  our  concep- 
tion of  overruling  power,  to  harmonize  our  lives  with 
the  will  or  determination  of  such  power.  And  this, 
it  would  seem,  is  religion's  permanent  or  underlying 
aim. 

By  the  rudest  minds  this  overruling  power  is  con- 
ceived as  embodied  in  many  forms,  human  in  kind, 
and  influenced  by  ordinary  human  motives:  the  con- 
ception of  deity  is  polytheistic  and  rudel}^  anthropo- 
morphic. At  a  stage  of  culture  relatively  more 
advanced, these  various  forms,  subordinated  by  de- 
grees to  the  authority  of  a  single  will,  coalesce  at 
length  in  a  single  power,  which,  however,  is  still 
conceived  as  personal  and, in  the  character  of  its  mo- 
tives,essentially  human:  religion  becomes  monothe- 
istic. Later  this  personality  is  idealized.  The  moral 
obligation,  at  first  but  loosely  associated  with  the  re- 
ligious, gains  in  time  a  certain  ascendency  among 
religious  obligations;  the  arbitrary  and  ceremonial 
elements  of  reli<fion  are  subordinated  or  slowly  de- 
cay;  and  in  the  comjilete  identification  of  the  jier- 
sonal  deity  with  the  moral  id(\'il  we  reach  tlie 
consummation  of  tlu^  anthropomorpliic  conception 
of  supreme  power. 


14  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

The  conception  of  overruling  power  as  a  human  or 
personal  deity, a  conception  which  tends  to  dissociate 
nature  from  her  inworking  life,  is  rarely  held,  how- 
ever, in  its  simplicity.  It  is  modified  inevitably  by 
the  effect  of  our  perpetual  contact  with  nature,  whose 
operations  challenge  all  attempts  to  conform  them  to 
personal  or  human  patterns, or  to  compress  them  with- 
in the  scope  of  quasi-human  ends  ;and  we  may  discover 
all  along  in  the  later  development  of  religious  thought 
traces  of  the  difficulty  which  has  been  felt,  especially 
in  moral  speculation,  in  completely  personifying 
nature,  or  deity  conceived  as  the  author  and  control- 
ler of  nature.  Theism  and  providential  theories 
have  felt  the  influence  of  naturalism,  or  the  habit  of 
dealing  with  nature  as  an  original  rather  than  a 
derivative  power. 

But  under  whatever  name  or  type  we  seek  to  fig- 
ure the  being  of  deity,  or  the  relations  which  we  sus- 
tain to  the  power,  natural  or  supernatural,  which  we 
call  divine,  the  type  is  more  or  less  blurred,  the  rela- 
tions are  more  or  less  confused.  The  subject,  in 
fact,  mocks  our  efforts  to  grasp  it.  Infinity  here  em- 
barrasses all  our  measurements  or  appreciations. 
The  mind,  passing  from  form  to  form,  each  in  some 
degree  intelligible,  finds  the  forms  numberless;  or, 
tracing  the  power  in  nature  through  its  perceptible 
modes, loses  its  way  in  an  endless  succession  of  modes. 
All  pathways  vanish  in  a  shadowy  land  to  which  not 
even  thought  can  climb:  to  us  their  end  is  mystery; 
and  our  vision  of  nature,  and  our  conception  of  the 
power  resident  in  nature  or  manifest  through  nature, 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  1 5 

are  obscured  under  the  continual  pressure  of  this 
mystery.  It  is  the  perceptible  and  the  intelligible, 
nevertheless,  which  give  to  the  impression  its  quality 
and  distinctiveness.  The  merely  inscrutable  is  to 
the  religious  sense  nothing.  The  power  which  every- 
where invites  our  scrutiny,  though  in  the  end  it 
outruns  all  inquiry  by  its  immensity  and  infinite  com- 
plexity, impresses  us  primarily  by  that  which  our 
scrutiny  reveals.  The  mj'stery  of  the  unknown  is 
the  suggestion  of  that  which  we  know.  Ar.d  we  are 
still  in  the  field  of  the  known  or  knowable  when  we 
consider  those  elements  or  aspects  of  universal  power 
which,  giving  color  by  induction  as  it  were  to  the 
vague  unknown  into  which  all  knowledge  fades,  are 
the  natural  and  universal  symbols  of  the  infinite,  the 
essential  objects  and  media  of  religious  thought. 

And  our  object  here  is  to  search  in  this  knowable 
realm  for  the  basis  of  a  religious  philosophy.  It  is 
not  our  purpose  to  trace  out  the  natural  history  of 
religion,  so  to  speak,  and  prove  its  identity  from  the 
germ  to  the  ripest  form.  Ethnologically,  that  is,  as 
phases  of  the  human  mind  maturing  under  dilTerent 
conditions,  all  the  forms  of  religion  have  value,  and 
science  properly  takes  cognizance  of  even  the  most 
barbarous  forms.  But  systems  of  religion  embody 
systems  of  thought — theories  of  nature  and  human 
nature — which  may  be  true  or  which  may  be  false; 
and  religious  philosopliy, great  as  is  its  debt  to  ethnol- 
ogy and  the  history  of  religions,  is,  as  philosophy, 
directly  interested  only  in  determining  the  theory 
whicli  is  true.      Its  aim  is  to  ascertain,  not  that  which 


1 6  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

men  have  hitherto  believed  or  done,  but,  within  the 
scope  of  its  subject,  that  which  in  fact  or  in  princi- 
ple is  true,  that  which  as  practical  law  is  wholesome 
and  sound.  .The  rationalization  of  religion,  in  short, 
is  its  object.  And  this  is  our  object  here.  And  as- 
suming that  the  subject-matter  of  religion  is  univer- 
sal power  and  the  method  of  harmonizing  our  lives 
with  its  laws,  we  shall  attempt  to  interpret  this  power, 
in  the  religious  sense,  as  natural  power,  and  to  de- 
duce the  method  of  the  religious  life  from  the  forms 
of  natural  law. 

As  against  the  utility  of  such  an  aim,  it  may  be 
urged  that  the  truth  of  religious  thought  is  of  little 
moment  as  compared  with  the  strength  of  religious 
feeling;  and  religion,  it  is  said,  is  most  fitly  defined 
in  terms  of  feeling.  And  doubtless  religion,  which 
to  have  any  effective  existence  must  exist  as  a  dom- 
inant force,  can  scarcely  be  said  to  be  present  where 
strong  emotional  elements  are  wanting.  But  mere 
excitement  or  hysteria  is  not  religion.  Religious 
feeling  is  the  emotional  phase  of  some  idea.  Our 
ideas  may  be  adopted  by  inheritance,  by  contact,  by 
insensible  absorption,  without  conscious  submission 
to  the  tests  of  truth ;  they  may  be  contradictory,  irrec- 
oncilable under  any  theory;  but  ideas  of  some  sort 
must  exist,  vaguely  and  confusedly  if  not  in  definite 
and  harmonious  relations,  as  necessary  elements  of 
the  religious  consciousness.  Thought  must  fuse  with 
feeling  in  the  same  conscious  state.  And  to  give 
definiteness  and  purpose  to  the  feeling  it  must  be  in- 
spired by  some  vital  defining  conception  of  the  gen- 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  1 7 

eral  aim  and  deeper  relations  of  life.  Strength  and 
concentration  of  feeling  cannot  proceed  from  confu- 
sion of  thought,  and  religious  feeling  is  weak  to-day 
because  it  has  lost  its  own  drift.  It  wants  the  direct- 
ive force  of  a  strong  and  persistent  idea. 

Or  it  is  urged  that  religion  is  essentially  a  matter 
of  conduct.  The  moralist,  looking  at  religion  mainly 
in  its  practical  aspect,  that  is,  as  characterized  by  the 
form  of  the  will  and  of  the  acts  which  it  initiates, 
contends  sometimes  that  there  is  little  in  religion  but 
the  discipline  of  the  will.  Conduct,  he  may  aver, 
has  but  the  remotest  connection  with  the  form  of  re- 
licrious  belief,  or  even  with  theories  of  conduct. 
Modes  of  faith  may  involve,  in  the  rigor  of  logic, 
conclusions  which  the  will  systematically  repudiates, 
and  errors  of  logic,  it  is  urged,  and  errors  of  faith  are 
alike  immaterial  if  one's  life  is  in  the  right.  And 
there  is  an  element  of  truth  in  this  contention.  Re- 
ligion on  its  practical  side,  which  is  mainly  ethical, 
has  adopted  the  results  of  experience.  The  religious 
life,  it  is  now  broadly  conceded,  must  be  first  of  all 
a  moral  life,  and  our  moral  ideals  have  assumed  the 
shape  in  which  we  find  them  only  after  prolonged 
and  varied  experimental  tests.  But  the  forms  of  re- 
ligious belief  or  the  theories  of  religion,  which  in- 
cludes the  theory  of  morals,  are  commonly  olTered  as 
superior  to  criticism  and  the  teachings  of  experience 
alike.  Theories  so  held  have,  unquestionably,  no 
vital  relation  to  practice.  A  verified  theory,  on  the 
other  ha!ul,  or  a  theory  which  had  received  sucli 
verification  as  a  considerate  view  of  experience   may 


1 8  NATURE   AND    DEITY 

afforo,  would  be  found  in  practice  invaluable.  Ethical 
distinctions  are  drawn  for  the  most  part  instinctively, 
that  is,  in  accordance  with  mental  habits  which  have 
been  organized  into  what  is  called  the  moral  con- 
sciousness, or  the  conscience.  But  the  moral  instincts 
appear  to  enjoy  no  special  immunity  from  error  or 
confusion.  In  undeveloped  tribes  they  share  the 
imperfect  development  of  the  mind,  and  among  va- 
rious tribes  give  various  and  sometimes  conflicting 
results.  And  even  in  developed  communities  the 
older  instincts  clash  with  sound  but  relativelj^  feeble 
convictions  of  a  later  civilization.  The  personal  ob- 
ligation as  intuitively  apprehended  conflicts  with  the 
public  obligation,  and  often  quite  overpowers  it. 
The  sublime  instinct  of  pity  may  fill  a  land  with  pau- 
pers. And,  in  general,  the  growing  complexity  of 
our  civilization  presents  problems  so  novel  and  intri- 
cate that  the  instincts  which  make  up  the  body  and 
force  of  conscience  are  not  seldom  at  fault  and  in- 
competent to  resolve  their  several  tendencies  into 
resolute  and  harmonious  action.  In  the  emergencies 
thus  arising  an  analysis  of  the  moral  situation  with 
reference  to  some  broad  principle  becomes  a  neces- 
sity, and  if  one  is  in  possession  of  a  well-grounded 
theory,  to  which  the  moot  questions  of  morals  may 
be  referred,  such  a  theorj^  has  the  strongest  possible 
relation  to  practice.  Theories  and  modes  of  faith 
which  cannot  be  tested,  or  which  ask  immunity  from 
the  tests  of  truth,  are  indeed  irrelevant  to  the  purpose 
of  the  teacher  or  disciplinarian.  An  attested  theory, 
on  the  other  hand,  is  his  chief  desideratum. 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  I9 

But  in  attempting  to  frame  such  a  theory,  the  theo- 
retical aspect  of  religion  (in  which  morals  must  be 
included)  is  isolated,  we  should  remember,  only  by 
abstraction.  Distinctions  in  the  field  of  view  serve 
a  useful  end,  of  course,  and  are  in  fact  indispensable 
to  the  accuracy  of  a  general  survey.  But  in  the  field 
of  mental  phenomena  few,  if  any  such  distinctions, 
are  absolute.  Religion,  as  a  form  of  thought,  must 
give  tone  to  the  feeling,  and,  so  far  as  the  convictions 
it  represents  are  genuine  convictions,  must  bear  upon 
the  will  and  its  acts;  as  feeling,  it  rests  upon  an  in- 
terpretation of  universal  power  and  a  certain  general 
view  of  life,  that  is,  upon  a  form  of  thought,  which, 
where  religion  is  a  vital  fact  and  not  a  mere  survival 
of  external  habit,  determines  the  form  and  tendency 
of  the  feeling;  while  in  its  practical  aspect,  that  is, 
as  it  affects  the  determinations  of  the  will,  it  stands 
in  immediate  relation  to  motives,  in  which  both  feel- 
ing and  thought  combine  to  express  themselves  in 
action.  Thought,  will,  and  feeling,  separable  in  idea, 
are  thus  inseparable  in  fact.  Our  view  will  be  dis- 
torted, therefore,  if  we  carry  the  distinction,  as  in 
pliilosophy  it  has  been  carried,  farther  than  is  neces- 
sary for  convenience  of  treatment.  As  a  vital  reality 
religion,  various  as  are  its  aspects,  shares  the  unity 
of  the  mind  which  is  its  seat. 

litre,  however,  our  immediate  object  being  neitlier 
edification  ntjr  disciplin(\we  must  leave  to  the  prophet 
and  mentor  the  main  di^eliaij^t*  of  these  hij^h 
functions.  Our  spccilic  jnirpose  is,  as  we  have  said, 
to  examini'   ihr    basis   of    ri'liifious    tlioujjlit    anil    tlie 


20  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

method  and  purpose  of  the  reh'gious  life,  in  the  hope 
of  contributing  in  some  degree  to  the  rationalization 
of  religious  theory.  How  much  the  matter  is  in  need 
of  revision  appears  from  the  general  unrest  which 
pervades  men's  minds.  For  centuries  the  funda- 
mental religious  idea,  though  variable  and  on  the 
whole  progressive,  has  corresponded  to  cosmic  con- 
ceptions which,  in  the  light  of  our  present  knowledge, 
are  felt  to  be  defective  and  misleading.  The  changed 
aspect  presented  by  the  face  of  nature  seems  to  re- 
quire some  modification  of  the  fundamental  religious 
idea  through  which  we  undertake  to  interpret  nature. 
At  any  rate,  doubt  and  disquiet  are  common;  and  as 
belief  without  evidence,  or  against  the  evidence, 
though  sometimes  paraded  as  a  virtue,  is  but  the 
vice  of  an  indolent  or  a  servile  mind,  our  only  course, 
if  Vv'e  really  respect  the  truth  and  are  anxious  for  a 
rational  adjustment  of  the  religious  problem,  is  to 
exiimiiie  the  crrounds  of  our  convictions  and  of  our 
doiib  '^,  nnd  to  reason  our  way,  if  possible,  to  a  well- 
rounded  belief.  And  the  end  to  be  attained  in  such 
nil  iiK[iiiry  is  not  merely  intellectual  assurance  and 
rr^poFe.  We  have  in  fact,  on  practical  grounds,  the 
strongest  of  motives  to  attempt  the  resolution  of  our 
doubts  or  the  rationalization  of  our  beliefs,  not  only 
in  the  elTect  of  religion  on  the  particular  form  of  the 
conduct,  but  in  the  tendency  of  religion — a  tendency 
which  strengthens  with  the  strength  of  religious  pos- 
session— to  harmonize  the  dissentient  impulses  of  the 
soul,  enlarge  and  unif}^  our  aims,  and  give  force  and 
efficacy  to  the  life.      Compare  our  skeptical  age  with 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  21 

the  ages  of  faith.      In  those   unreflecting  ages — how 
vainly  we  sigh  for  their  rclurn — faith  was  weakened 
by  no  misgivings  or  reserves.      It  had  then  the  force 
of    a    real    conviction.      And   to    what   achievement, 
what  sacrifice,  men  were  borne  by  their  faith!      But 
the  force  of  that  conviction   fails.      The   old   tenden- 
cies in  the  feelings  and  the  will  yet  retain  a  strength 
that  is  left  of  habit   and    certain    remnants   of   belief, 
but  the  faith  that  sustained  them  is  feeble  or  wanting, 
and  loss  of  faith  must  betray   itself   in    distraction    of 
feeling  and  flaws  of  the  will,  unless  genuine   convic- 
tions m;ike  good   the   decay.      Conviction,  however, 
in  a  candid    mind,  comes    not   with    the    wishing:   it 
follows  the  weight  of  evidence.      There  are  many,  it 
is  true,  who  value  what  is  taught  as  religion  less  for 
the  evidence  of  its  truth  than  for  its  iteration  of  pleas- 
ing hopes.      To  such  fables  will   still   be   told.      And 
the  number  of  this  kind,  and  the  vogue   which   num- 
bers give  to  a  timorous  and  sensuous  habit  in  religious 
thought,  have  driven  men  of  virile  minds  and  women 
with  a  passion  for  truth  to  aver  that  the  whole  fabric 
of  religion  is  but  the  eilect  of  illusiiMi.      Let  us  by  all 
means,  even  in  religion,  divide  fancy   from   fact,  the 
presumj:)tions  of  desire  from  the  convictions  of  truth. 
It  is  time  that  the  sense  of  veracity  and  the  power  to 
apj")reciate  evidence  should  make  themselves   felt   in 
religious  philosophy  as  in  science.      But  whatever  we 
discard,  the  power  ojierative  in  nature,  immanent  or 
transcendent,  remains.      And    we  remain,  subject   to 
the  laws  of  growth  and  cKeay,  of  sulTering  and   joy, 
of  well-being  and  ill,  as  in  the  nature  of  things  estab- 


22  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

lished.  The  form  of  these  laws,  the  mode  of  their 
operation,  and  our  general  relations  to  the  power  to 
which  they  owe  their  force,  are  questions  of  fact; 
and  there  must  be  some  statement  of  such  laws,  if  by 
wit  or  patience  or  good  hap  we  may  arrive  at  it, 
which  is  true.  We  must  allow,  therefore,  unless  we 
dogmatically  den}^  the  possibility  of  such  a  statement, 
or  insist  on  a  definition  of  religion  which  excludes  it 
from  the  domain  of  nature  and  of  rational  thought, 
that  there  may  be  a  true  religious  philosophy,  or  a 
resolution  of  the  fundamental  problems  presented  in 
each  individual  life  which  will  command  the  cre- 
dence and  attention  of  the  most  rigorous  devotee  of 
truth.  And  this  fundamental  truth  has  the  same  vital 
interest  for  the  rational  mind  by  whatever  name  it 
be  known.  The  aim  of  the  present  inquiry  is  the 
exploration  of  this  truth,  and  religion  is  here  under- 
stood as  resting,  proximately  at  least,  on  a  basis  of 
natural  law. 


II. 


AUe   Schopfung   ist  werk  der  Natur.  —  Goethe. 

internum  namque  illud  et  infinitum  ens,  quod  Deum   seu    naturara 
appellamus,  eadera,  qua  existit,  necessitate  agit. — Spinoza. 

Aside  from  verbal  revelation,  which  is  usually  re- 
garded as  without  the  scope  of  philosophical  inquiry, 
the  tendency  of  religious  thought  has  been  to  search 
for  its  fundamental  principles  in  the  constitution,  or 
assumed  original  content,  of  the  mind  itself,  as  known 
a  prior i^  that  is,  with  more  than  empirical  certainty. 
It  has  seemed  unsafe  to  build  on  sensible  data,  or 
upon  experience  which  may  be  resolved  into  sensible 
elements.  Descartes,  accordingl}',  finding  in  the 
mind  the  idea  of  an  intlnite  being  of  infinite  perfec- 
tions, maintained  that  such  an  idea  could  never  or- 
iginate in  an  imperfect  and  finite  mind,  and  must  be 
traced  to  such  infinite  being  actually  existent  as  its 
only  adecpuite  cause.  And  so  he  would  prove,  with- 
out other  evidence  than  the  idea  of  God,  the  actual 
existence  of  God  in  character  antl  tlistinctiveness 
corresponding  to  the  idea.  Kant,  again,  unable  to 
construe  the  mere  presence  of  an  idea  in  the  mind  as 
proof  of  the  existence  of  a  corresponding  object,  held 
that  the  assumption  of  God's  existence  is  a  necessity 
of  the  moral  consciousness,  an  inevitable  hyjiolhcsis 
of  the  practical  reason,  which  nuist  assume  the  ex- 
istence of  a  cause  adequate  to  the  complete  fulfillment 

23 


24  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

of  the  moral  law  and  its  complete  fruition  in  perfect 
happiness.  And  this  law,  in  virtue  of  which  Kant 
postulates  freedom  and  immortality  also,  he  authen- 
ticates by  reference,  apparently,  to  a  supersensuous 
or  intelligible  or  noumenal  source.  And  thus,  by 
intuition,  by  inner  suggestion,  by  deduction  aprt07'i\ 
or  by  some  purely  mental  necessity,  the  certainty 
which  we  demand  for  the  fundamental  datum  of  our 
religious  systems,  that  is,  for  the  existence  of  a  being 
whose  attributes  and  power  are  the  sole  and  suffi- 
cient basis  of  religion,  is  believed  to  be  secured  with- 
out impairment  or  attainder  of  sense. 

But  the  possibility  of  reaching  such  supra-sensible 
certainty  becomes  more  doubtful  the  more  we  study 
the  operations  of  the  mind.  The  old  philosophies 
borrow  their  premises  from  a  premature  psychology. 
Modern  theories  of  cognition  point  to  the  conclusion 
that  first  principles  so-called,  and,  in  general,  princi- 
ples assumed  a -priori^  cannot  either  in  religion  or  in 
science  be  traced  to  a  unique  and  mystical  source 
absolutely  dissevered  from  the  sources  of  sensuous 
knowledge,  or  pretend,  in  virtue  of  their  origin  sim- 
ply, to  a  certainty  so  absolute  that  it  is  superior  to 
criticism  and  needs  no  verification.  With  much 
pains  we  have,  it  would  seem,  inverted  the  order  of 
thought.  It  is  not  the  general  principle,  we  learn, 
but  the  sensible  impression  which  is  the  original 
datum.  Not  the  law  of  gravitation  but  the  fall  of  the 
apple  is  first  apprehended.  And  the  process  of  knowl- 
edge is  in  all  cases  essentially  the  same:  it  is  the 
same  mortal  and  fallible  mind  which  applies  itself  to 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  25 

all  the  data  of  knowledge,  arriving  at  such  degree 
of  certainty  as  the  conditions  of  knowledge  and 
the  opportunities  of  verification  permit.  Even 
the  foundations  of  mathematics — mathematics,  the 
type  of  certainty  and  the  env}'  of  metaphysicians — 
are  laid  in  experience.  In  short,  experience,  once 
despised,  by  reason  of  its  dependence  on  sense,  as 
infecting  with  a  species  of  taint  all  knowledge  into 
which  it  enters,  appears  to  afford  the  grounds  of 
whatever  certainty  attaches  to  principles  assumed  a 
Priori  and  exalted  above  experience. 

Leaving  out  of  consideration,  then,  theories  which 
assume  a  sphere  and  faculty  of  cognition  independent 
of  experience,  we  find  current  a  theory  which  allies 
itself  more  closely  with  the  assumptions  of  common 
thought.  It  is  essentially  a  dualistic  theory.  It  pos- 
tulates, it  is  true,  an  original,  eternal,  self-existent 
spirit  from  whom  all  things  proceed,  and  is  in  so  far 
monistic;  but  the  creation  which  it  assumes  is  a  pro- 
cess remote  from  the  common  thought,  or  a  mere 
dogma  of  which  no  exposition  is  attempted:  virtually 
it  recognizes  a  thorough-going  partition  of  being,  a 
material  substance  shaped  by  an  immaterial  force,  a 
universal  body  intormed  by  a  universal  mind.  And 
these  correlatives,  matter  and  spirit,  body  and  mind, 
reflect,  it  is  obvious,  the  opposition  conceived  as  ex- 
isting between  the  human  body  and  the  human  mind. 
The  mind  is  regarded  as  a  several  whole,  with  an 
individuality  distinct  from  that  of  the  l)()dv,  which  it 
o':cupies  as  a  tenant  liolds  his  tenement,  and  wliich 
in  (hie  time  it  will  cjuit  with  no  impairment  of   its  or- 


26  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

iginal  character,  but  with  enlargement  of  its  freedom 
rather,  the  body  being  regarded,  after  old  Heraclitus, 
as  the  prison  or  grave  of  the  spirit  which  at  death  is 
restored  to  liberty  and  life.  But  the  relation  between 
body  and  mind  is  more  intimate  than  this  hypothesis 
implies.  The  mind,  in  its  growth,  modifications,  and 
decay  reflects  with  minute  fidelity  the  growth,  mod- 
ifications, and  decay  of  the  hody^  and  particularly  of 
those  parts  of  the  body — the  brain  and  nerves  and 
the  organs  of  sense — which  are  most  immediately  as- 
sociated with  our  conscious  life.  Such  concomitance 
seems  to  point  to  a  certain  dependence  or  interde- 
pendence, or  some  sort  of  causal  connection.  The 
relation,  in  fact,  is  so  intimate  that  it  is  difficult  if  not 
impossible  to  isolate  the  sphere  of  mental  activity  by 
any  definite  boundary.  No  sharp  line  marks  the 
threshold  of  consciousness.  And  shall  we  say  that 
there  is  nothing  corresponding  to  mental  life  below 
the  line?  Ordinarily  we  limit  the  sphere  of  mind  to 
the  sphere  of  consciousness;  but  all  conscious  action 
is  found  to  rest  upon  a  basis  of  unconscious  activity 
in  which,  as  it  would  seem,  it  were  arbitrary  to  deny 
that  there  is  something  of  intelligence  or  of  the  qual- 
ity of  mind.  Starting  with  the  dualistic  theory  of 
human  personality  it  seems  impossible  to  resolve 
away  the  dualism  even  below  the  threshold  of  con- 
sciousness and  beyond  the  immediate  organs  of  men- 
tal life.  In  every  organic  structure,  in  every  cell, 
and  even  in  each  proximate  principle,  we  discover 
functions,  affinities,  self-determining  powers,  which 
seem  to  bear  to  the  matter  in  which  they  reside  rela- 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  27 

tions  similar  to  those  which  the  mind  as  a  whole  bears 
to  the  body  as  a  whole.  Thus  in  the  last  analysis 
body  and  mind,  or  their  representative  elements,  are 
still  undissociated,  and  the  conclusion  seems  to  force 
itself  upon  us  that  the  same  process  which  compounds 
the  material  elements  into  the  substance  of  the  body 
develops  by   gradation    all  the  qualities  of  mind. 

But  the  hypothesis  that  the  body  is  the  merely 
local  and  temporary  habitation  of  the  mind,  or  a  ma- 
chine which  may  be  spatially  distinguished  from  its 
director, the  mind,  has  been  extended,  we  have  said, 
beyond  the  limits  of  our  particular  being  to  the  realm 
of  universal  being.  The  phenomena  of  sensible  ob- 
servation are  aOiliated  upon  a  kind  of  body  known  as 
nature,  a  bod}^  which,  in  virtue  of  the  orderly  and 
systematic  character  of  its  movements,  is  assumed  to 
be  under  the  control  of  a  being  who  is  individually 
and  severally  distinguished  from  this  body,  and  whose 
essence  is  spirit  or  mind.  Or,  pushing  the  distinc- 
tion to  its  extreme,  we  conceive  of  matter,  the  ab- 
stract of  all  sensible,  ponderable  stull,  as  brute  and 
inert,  without  life  or  direction,  save  as  animated  by 
that  self-sustaining  spirit  which  is  conceived  as  the 
original  source  of  life  and  mind  in  general.  But 
closer  familiarity  with  nature  than  was  possible  with 
primitive  methods  of  investigation  teaches  us  that 
matter  brute  and  inert  has  no  existence.  Life  and 
mind,  or  the  activities  which  are  believed  to  betray 
the  influence  of  life  and  mind,  are  present  in  the 
minutest  atom.  There  is  nothing  in  nature  which 
is   merely   passive,   dependent,  lifeless.      Kvery    ele- 


28  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

ment  has  its  inherent  qualities,  its  original  activity 
and  impulse,  which,  however  compounded  or  ob- 
scured, are  never  annulled,  and  the  intelligence  which 
has  been  conceived  as  centered  in  a  separate  presid- 
ing mind  is  found  omnipresent  in  nature  and  involved 
in  the  very  existence  of  matter.  Matter  and  spirit, 
that  is  to  say,  are  separable  in  thought  but  inseparable 
in  fact.  The  reality,  considered  from  without,  as 
inert  object  passively  determined  by  some  guiding 
force  or  principle  conceptual]}^  distinguished  from 
the  object,  is  body  or  matter:  considered  from  with- 
in, as  subject  and  itself  the  origin  of  determinative 
force,  it  is  spirit  or  mind.  And  as  this  inner  deter- 
minative principle,  thus  distinguished  from  matter  in 
thought,  is  never  dissociated  from  matter  in  fact,  it 
would  seem  more  reasonable  to  regard  the  directive 
principle  of  nature  in  general  as  immanent  and  in- 
herent in  the  bod}^  of  nature  than  to  erect  it,  hypos- 
tatizing  our  abstraction,  into  a  several,  distinct  and 
transcendent  being. 

Be^'ond  this  we  need  not  go.  The  ultimate  con- 
stitution of  matter  and  mind  it  is  unnecessary  to  dis- 
cuss in  the  present  inquiry.  So  far  as  we  are  now 
concerned,  we  may  treat  either  as  a  function  of  its 
correlative,  taking  sides  with  the  spiritualists  on  the 
one  hand  or  the  materialists  on  the  other;  or,  with 
certain  evolutionists,  we  ma}^  regard  them  as  inde- 
pendent entities  exhibiting  parallel  phenomena;  or 
we  may  interpret  them  after  the  manner  of  Spinoza, 
in  a  monistic  sense,  as  coordinate  aspects  of  one  and 
the  same  complex  reality.      But  all  theories  must  as- 


NATURE    AND    DP:iTY  29 

sume  the  being  of  nature,  and  the  action  of  a  direct- 
ive principle  in  the  operations  of  nature.  Here  we 
insist  only  that  this  directive  principle  be  interpreted, 
in  religion  as  in  science,  through  the  modes  of  nature, 
that  is  to  say,  we  recognize  the  sufficiency  of  natural 
law  in  the  sphere  of  religious  thought. 

But  in  the  criticism  of  men's  beliefs  we  have 
always  to  remember  the  preoccupations  and  the  happy 
inconsequence  of  the  human  mind.  Even  philoso- 
phers will  illogically  reach  conclusions  that  are  true 
from  premises  that  are  false,  and  few  theories  are  in 
practice  pressed  strictly  to  their  full  sequence  of 
error.  It  is  inevitable  too  that  general  theories 
adopted  without  much  examination  to  explain  a  com- 
plex assemblage  of  facts,  which  are  themselves  in- 
distinctly apprehended,  should  be  conceived  with 
more  or  less  looseness,  and  that  theories  mutually 
exclusive  should  be  found  maintaining  a  certain  foot- 
ing side  by  side  in  the  same  hospitable  mind.  We 
find,  accordingly,  that  the  conception  of  spirit  as 
pure  activit}',  and  of  body  as  purely  passive,  is  really 
lost  sight  of  in  the  ordinary  view.  The  human  body 
is  conceived  as  having  a  certain  life  of  its  own,  inde- 
pendent of  the  indwelling  mind;  and  nature,  in  like 
manner,  is  accorded  undefined  limits  within  which 
she  is  vaguely  supposed  to  exercise  a  certain  initi- 
ative, and  to  be  capable  on  her  own  motion  of  orderly 
and  harmonious  action.  The  elemental  activities, 
thr  growth  of  i^lants,  tlu^  instinct  of  animals,  may  be 
included  in  the  limits  thus  assigned  to  nature,  limits, 
however,  which  each  man  extends   or   contracts   ac- 


30  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

cording  to  his  point  of  view  or  the  general  tendency 
of  his  thought;   while  the  presiding  mind  is  conceived 
as  combining  the  more  or  less  dissociated   activities 
of  nature  to   general  ends,  and    particularly   in   the 
human  interest  and  to  moral  ends.      And   this  is  the 
compromising   view    of   the   matter   most    generally 
taken,  perhaps,  among   ourselves   to-day.     The   im- 
manent life  of  nature  forces  recognition  by  the  univer- 
sality of  its  manifestation;   while  the  sphere  of  deity, 
as  the  external,  governing  mind,  is  restricted,  barring 
sporadic  cases  of  divine  interposition,  to  the   realiza- 
tion of   high    and   ulterior   ends,  and,  in   general,  to 
such  facts  or  phenomena  as  cannot  be  explained  on 
"natural"  grounds.      Hence  every   great  acquisition 
of  science  seems,  by  extending  the  bounds  of  nature, 
to   shrink    the   domain    of   deity.      But    the    field    of 
nature,  the  sphere  of  natural  law,  still  widens.     And 
each  such  extension    strengthens   our   latent   convic- 
tion of  the  universality   of   natural   law,  so   that  we 
trace  with  increasing  confidence  the  broadest  tenden- 
cies and  the  highest  results  discoverable  in  the  activ- 
ity of  nature  not  to  a  purpose  imposed  upon  her  from 
without,  but  to  principles  recognized   as   proceeding 
from    within,  and    germane    to    her    proper    sphere. 
There  seems,  at  length,  to   be   no    room   or   require- 
ment for   the   activity   of    a    several,  individual,  and 
presiding  mind  dominating  from  afar  the   activity   of 
nature.      The  unknown  as  fast  as  it  becomes   known 
is  found  to  be  natural;  the  abstract  and  general,  once 
assumed  as  the  pure  product  of  mind,    or  as  an    ema- 
nation from  a  purely  mental  or  ''intelligible"  world, 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  3 1 

appear  but  to  note  our  discrimination  and  summation 
of  certain  particulars  perceived  in  the  concreteness 
of  the  natural  world ;  and  the  conclusion  seems  in- 
evitable that  the  intelligence  which  we  had  set  over 
against  nature,  as  the  readiest  explanation  of  her  or- 
der and  harmonies,  is  inherent  in  the  constitution  of 
nature. 

But  is  not  this  conclusion  over-bold   as  yet?     Are 
the  methods  of  nature  so  patent  and  familiar  that  we 
can    deny   the    intervention    of   any   occult    or   non- 
natural  principle  whatever  in  the  operations  of  nature? 
Development  theories  are  rife — and  plausible.    They 
explain    much,    perhaps;  but    there    is    much    more 
which  they  are  but  assumed  to  explain.      Have   they 
as  yet  made  intelligible,  for  instance,  the  process   by 
which  life  in  the  specific  sense  is  evolved  from  inan- 
imate matter,  or  from  matter  which    is   alive   only  in 
the   broader  or,  if  you   please,    metaphorical   sense? 
Or  if  it  be  allowed  that  the  physiologist  has  discovered 
in  the  affinity  of  protoplasm  for  oxygen  the  inorganic 
reason  for  organic  movement — or  the   chemical   ex- 
planation   of   a   biological   fact   and    the    transitional 
stage  between  animate    and    inanimate    being — what 
shall  we  say  of  the   transition   from   the   unconscious 
to  the  conscious,  from   physiological    life   to  psychic 
life?      Is  not  the  wit  of  savant  and  philosopher  baffled 
in  every  attempt  to  figure  in  i magi  nation  even  a  pos- 
sible  mode    of    such    transition?      In    excludinif    the 
supernatural  and  allirminif   the  suflicirncv  of   natural 
causes    we  are,  it    would    seem,  but   substitutin<r    one 
hypothesis    for   another.      And    wc    may    admit    that 


32  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

this  is  true.  But  the  hypothesis  on  which  we  are 
proceeding  seems  the  more  reasonable  of  the  two, 
seeing  that  the  hypothesis  of  the  supernatural  is  not 
supported  by  what  we  know  and  understand,  but  rests 
upbn  a  putative  basis  in  the  unintelligible  and  the  un- 
known. We  might  even  contend  that  there  is  no 
operation  of  the  mind  by  which  the  supernatural  can 
be  known.  But  it  is  not  our  purpose  to  discuss  the 
theory  of  knowledge.  The  hypothesis,  if  such  we 
must  still  call  it,  of  the  universality  and  sufficiency  of 
natural  law  is  a  postulate  of  this  inquiry.  Nature, 
as  contrasted  with  humanity  and  the  human  mind  is 
assumed  so  far  at  least  as  the  present  investigation  is 
concerned,  as  coextensive  with  being,  and  our  prob- 
lem is  to  outline  the  philosophy  of  religion,  if  such  a 
thing  may  be  done,  upon  principles  not  assumed  to 
tianscend  the  sphere  of  the  simply  natural. 


III. 

All  the  vast  bodies  that  compose  this  mighty  frame,  how  distant 
and  remote  soever,  are  by  some  secret  mechanism,  some  divine  art 
and  force,  linked  in  a  mutual  dependence  and  intercourse  with  each 
other. — Berkeley 

Taking  the  ground,  then,  that  nature  is  in  religion 
as  in  science  the  proper  field  of  knowledge,  we  iden- 
tify, generally,  the  power  which  is  the  theme  of  re- 
ligious thought  with  nature's  universal  energy. 

But  nature  touches  us  in  every  mood  and  appeals 
to  us  in  every  sense.  Environed  and  sustained  by 
nature,  we  cannot  for  an  instant  escape  her  influence, 
or  survive  out  of  relation  with  lier  in  any  element  of 
our  being.  All  is  nature.  According  to  the  theory 
upon  which  we  are  proceeding,  all  is  natural.  Good 
and  evil,  fair  and  foul, man's  wretchedness  and  wrong 
no  less  than  his  noblest  virtues  and  greatest  good  fort- 
une, are  all  alike  the  issue  of  the  processes  of  nature. 
It  is  not  enough,  therefore,  simply  to  identify  tlie 
power  to  wliich  religious  feeling  appeals  and  re- 
sponds with  natural  power.  How  may  we  conceive 
of  tliis  jiowrr,  which  in  its  universality  impresses  us 
in  every  form  of  being,  and  through  every  sense,  as 
appealing  to  us  distinctively  in  the  religious  sense? 

If  we  noti*  the  habit  of  the  relitrious  mind  we  tiiul 
it  most  impressible  to  nature  apprehendi'd  in  the 
large,  in  such  general  motions  and  broader  pliases  as 

ay 


34  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

efface  the  sense  of  the  individual,  the  particular,  and 
the  personal.  The  specific  thing,  its  color  and  line 
and  curious  detail,  are  searched  by  the  intellect,  as  it 
searches  everywhere,  in  the  mere  zeal  to  know;  but 
the  religious  sense,  ignoring  the  egoism  and  conten- 
tions of  particular  being,  searches  for  an  all-embrac- 
ing unit}^  in  virtue  of  which  the  particular  and  the 
individual  exist,  and  from  which  they  borrow  such 
religious  interest  as  they  awaken.  It  tends  continually 
to  grasp  nature  as  its  object  under  the  form  of  a  single 
idea. 

This  tendency  may  be  compared  with  the  philo- 
sophical impulse  to  unif}-  our  knowledge,  or  to  reduce 
all  nature  as  the  general  object  of  knowledge  to  a 
single  principle,  type,  or  form.  But  the  mere  unifi- 
cation of  knowledge  will  not  in  itself  content  the  re- 
ligious impulse.  The  unity  of  the  natural  world  is 
sometimes  conceived,  for  instance, as  unity  of  compo- 
sition, and  the  chemist  would  determine, in  hydrogen, 
say,  or  in  some  element  perhaps  as  yet  undissociated, 
the  ultimate  form  of  matter,  and  thus  reduce  all  nature 
to  a  primal  substratum  or  stuff.  But  atomic  units  are 
of  as  little  service  to  religion  as  atomic  weights. 
There  is  nothing  necessarily  hostile  to  the  religious 
interest  in  the  idea  of  a  universe  compounded  of  sim- 
ilar elements,  which  yield  by  their  permutations  and 
combinations  the  infinite  diversity  so  grateful  to  our 
human  sense.  A  rational  religion  must  find  means  to 
accommodate  itself  to  any  fact,  if  it  be  indeed  a  fact. 
But  religion  has  its  peculiar  interests,  and  interprets 
the  universe  only  as  it  seems  to  be  related  to  such  in- 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  35 

terests;  and  though  the  minute  investigation  of  nature 
has  given  us  a  truer  conception  of  natural  processes 
and  natural  power,  the  religious  interest  attaches  to 
being  as  compounded  rather  than  to  the  elemental 
points  or  pulses  of  being,  to  nature  alive  and  whole, 
rather  than — to  recall  the  sneer  of  Mephistopheles 
in  Faust — to  nature  broken  and  disintegrated  and 
stripped  of  her  vital  charm. 

And  yet  the  finer  anal^^sis  to  which  nature  has 
been  subjected  by  the  science  of  our  time  does  but 
confirm  and  extend  the  view  which  the  general  life 
of  nature  might  at  any  time  suggest.  Poh  theism, 
pantheism,  and  a)l  the  forms  of  worship  which  sim- 
ply deify  the  power  of  nature,  are  evidence  of  a  na- 
tive tendency  in  man  to  conceive  the  action  of  nature, 
as  it  was  apprehended  by  the  Ionic  founders  of  phi- 
losophy,under  the  form  of  vital  action.  A  closer  study 
of  the  facts  corrects,  of  course,  the  extravagance  and 
crudity  of  many  primitive  notions.  But  closer  stud}^ 
discloses  everywhere  in  nature  interaction,  interde- 
pendence, correspondence.  The  light  of  the  stars 
tinds  an  answering  sensibility  in  the  eye;  the 
p(jnderous  eartli  thrills  with  maiden  delicacy  to 
the  varying  moods  of  the  sun;  and  the  same  ele- 
mental forces  which  sustain  the  planetary  masses 
centre  in  a  droji  of  dew.  And  in  this  universal  recip- 
rocity and  communion,  comparable  with  tlie  nexus 
which  correlates  and  unilies  the  parts  of  a  livin<'  be- 
ing, we  see  all  things  bound  to  all  in  vital  union.  A 
common  principle  animates  and  conscMvrs  in  prrfect 
solidarity  the  general  mass  of    nature.      Mens  Ui^ildt 


36  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

moIe7n.  The  wide  expanse  of  being,  with  its  be- 
wildering activities  and  endless  diversity  of  form, 
we  conceive  and  rationalize  as  a  process  of  growth, 
resolution,  and  regeneration,  in  accordance  with  an 
immanent  law.  Its  unity  or  solidarity  is  an  organic 
unity. 

And  in  contemplation  of  this  pervading  life  we 
seem  to  come  nearer  to  the  unifying  principle  which 
in  the  religious  interest  we  seek.  Unity  of  organi- 
zation, however,  is  not  to  be  confounded  here  with 
numerical  unity.  The  synthesis  in  virtue  of  which 
we  attempt  to  conceive  of  nature  as  an  organic  unit 
is  never  completed  ;  though  all  forms  of  being  coalesce 
in  relations  of  organic  union,  this  union  is  never  pre- 
sented as  an  organic  whole.  Nature  discloses  no  ul- 
timate limit.  None  of  our  individualizing  terms,  there- 
fore, which  define  by  comparison  as  from  without  are 
in  strictness  applicable  to  nature  universal,  whom  we 
know  only  from  within,  and  interpret  only  by  pro- 
gressive application  of  laws  originally  learned  as  in 
relation  to  the  particular  and  finite.  And  this  pro- 
gressive expansion  of  our  knowledge  of  nature  is 
never  finished.  The  organic  nexus  which  binds  the 
elements  and  forces  of  nature  never  completes  itself 
to  our  apprehension  in  a  perfected  organism,  in  the 
sum  of  all  being  rounded  off  as  a  unit  of  being.  Nat- 
ure, that  is  to  say,  is  infinite. 

But  the  term  infinite  is  itself  misinterpreted.  What- 
ever is  distinguished  as  an  object  of  thought  so  far  as 
to  receive  a  distinctive  name,  tends  by  analogy  to  dis- 
sociate itself  from    other   named   objects   of    thought 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  37 

with  more  or  less   definite,  not    to    say    spatial,  com- 
pleteness.     We  objectify  our  own  concepts  or  ideas. 
And  thus   the   term    infinite    (or   endless),    which    is 
properly  a   disclaimer   of    bounds   and   terminals,    is 
itself  conceived  as  implying,  even    when    applied   to 
universal  being,  a    certain    completed  and     bounded 
individuality;   whereas  its   true    significance    is   that 
the  particulars    through    which,  in    accordance    with 
the  laws  of    thought,  we  seek   in    any    given    case  to 
represent  to  ourselves  the  universal  object  of  thought 
are  never  exhausted.      Infinite  being  is  not  an  object 
definitely  presented  to  our  apprehension  and  difTering 
in  kind  from  the  beings   we   call  finite.      It   includes 
all  being,  and,  in  the  degree   to  which   the   finite    in 
any  case  extends,  is  coincident  with  the  finite.    The 
idea  of  the  infinite  has  thus   both  positive    and  nega- 
tive elements — a  positive  content, but  vanishing  limits. 
While  we  yet  regard   being   tlirough    its    oppositions 
and  repulsions,  in  its    exterior   relations,  its    bounda- 
ries  and  individuality  and   form,  it    is  finite;   and  all 
defining  thousfht,  all  thout^ht  which  rests    in  contem- 
plation  of  a  definite  relation  or  particular   content    in 
its  object,  must,  by   the   force    of    the    terms,  be   the 
thought  of  an  obj  "Jct  as  finite.    But  as    thought  trans- 
cends particular  linens    and    removes    each  successive 
limit,  resting  at  no  limitation,  it  passes  frcmi  the  finite 
to  the  infinite.   The  substance  of  the  finite  remains  to 
give  cont(Mit  and  meaning  to  the  infinite,    or  the  infi- 
nite were  but  a  name;  but  the   process  which  carries 
the  mind  from  limit    to    limit    is    never    finished;   the 
finite  rims  into  infinite  series,  the  progression  is  end- 
less. 


38  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

While  therefore  we  see  all  the  elements  of  being 
subsisting  in  living  organic  union,  the  fact  that  being 
is  infinite,  transcending  all  limits  and  exhausting  all 
modes,  should  deter  us  from  any  attempt  to  conclude 
under  the  form  of  a  unitarj'  conception,  as  whole  or 
all,  as  object  or  person,  or  even  as  organism,  the 
characters  of  being  universally^  Infinite  being  can 
be  reduced  to,  or  defined  by,  no  assignable  form  of 
being.  It  appears  in  thought  only  representatively, 
through  the  finite,  and  no  particlar  form  of  being, 
as  the  human  or  personal,  can  serve  as  such  a  defi- 
nition of  being  universal  that  we  may  deduce  from  it 
particular  conclusions  as  to  the  course  of  nature,  for 
instance,  or  the  destiny  of  man.  Our  knowledge  of 
nature  is  attained  by  a  study  of  the  particulars  of  nat- 
ure. We  consider  her  in  certain  relations,  and  what 
we  learn  of  her  is  valid  in  such  relations.  We  ap- 
proach her  from  a  dillerent  aspect  and  add  to  our 
knowledge.  Continuing  our  observations,  we  extend 
our  view,  subsuming  under  a  few  brief  principles 
perhaps,  like  the  laws  of  motion,  a  vast  assemblage 
of  facts.  And  we  may  reach  at  length  a  point  so 
remote  from  the  actual  objects  of  sensible  experience 
that  our  thought,  forgetting  the  data  of  its  knowledge 
and  objectifying  the  product  of  its  own  abstraction, 
leaps  to  the  conclusion  that  it  has  attained,  without 
the  intervention  of  sense,  to  a  conception  or  idea  by 
which  we  may  define  the  Infinite,  and  from  which 
we  may  extend  our  knowledge  deductively,  without 
consideration  of  the  facts,  and  even  in  the  teeth  of 
the  facts.      So  Plato  defined  and  objectified  the  orig- 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  39 

inal  creative  principle  as  The  Good,  which  he  referred 
to  a  noetic  world,  a  world  of  the  mind;  and  so  our 
theologians  still  objectify  the  Moral  Ideal,  or  identify 
it  with  an  individual  yet  infinite  spirit — the  concep- 
tion has  never  been  cleared  of  its  contradictions — 
dwelling  apart  in  the  spiritual  world.  And  from  the 
character  assigned  to  such  infinite  spirit  it  is  assumed 
that  we  may  draw  various  conclusions  as  to  the  facts 
of  life.  But  the  process  is  illicit.  A  principle,  or 
concept,  or  idea,  by  whatever  effort  of  abstraction 
or  imagination  it  is  reached,  is  still,  so  far  as  it  is 
legitimate  and  intelligible,  but  an  abstract  or  re-com- 
bination of  certain  data  of  experience,  with  no  higher 
warrant  than  the  warrant  of  such  experience,  and 
neither  takes  us  quite  out  of  the  world  of  sensible 
observation  nor  acquires  such  comprehensiveness  and 
breadth  that  it  may  serve  as  an  exhaustive  definition 
of  the  infinite  or  the  a  priori  ground  of  a  complete 
religious  philosophy.  We  cannot  compress  the  in- 
finite and  universal  into  a  premiss.  We  have  no  such 
premiss  or  key  furnished  in  advance  for  the  general 
interpretation  of  nature — the  dream  of  mediaeval  sci- 
ence— and  we  have  no  sufiicient  clew  in  the  assumed 
general  character  or  aims  of  the  infinite  for  the  an- 
ticipation of  our  luunan  destiny — the  illusion  slill  of 
theological  science.  Man  and  nature  must  be  studied 
through  the  particulars  of  human  history  and  natural 
events,  and  in  religion  as  in  science  the  deductions  of 
thought  must  start  from  the  inductions  of  experience, 
(^ur  knowledge  is  not  restiicted,  it  is  true,  to  the 
bare  fact  or  actuality  observed.   Experience  has  bred 


40  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

in  us  the  assurance — an  assurance  which  logically 
antedates  our  logic  whether  of  induction  or  deduc- 
tion, that  nature's  methods  are  uniform,  that  when 
the  conditions,  particularly  the  conditions  distin- 
guished as  causal,  are  the  same  the  behavior  of  nat- 
ure will  be  the  same.  In  dealing  with  the  elemental 
forms  and  relations  of  matter  we  thus  arrive  at  prin- 
ciples of  broad  and  very  general  application.  The 
law  of  gravitation,  for  instance,  is  applied  to  all  mat- 
ter; the  principles  of  mathematics  are  extended  to 
all  space;  and  the  physicist  turns  his  spectroscope 
with  absolute  confidence  in  therevelations  of  color  and 
light  to  the  remotest  point  which  glows  in  the  heav- 
ens. Experience,  therefore,  when  its  results  are 
sifted  and  verified,  is  not  coterminous  with  history, 
but  guides  us  with  equal  security  through  the  "dark 
backward  and  ab3^sm  of  time"  and  the  dim  reaches 
of  the  future.  The  book  of  nature  is  both  a  record 
and  a  prophecy.  And  the  increase  of  our  familiarity 
with  nature  may  continue  indefinitely.  No  single 
mind,  in  fact,  can  contain  what  now  is  known.  Yet 
however  broad  we  make  the  sphere  of  the  known, 
our  knowledge  is  conditioned  by  the  experience  of 
which  it  is  the  abstract.  We  know  that  the  particu- 
lar fact  will  recur  if  onl3^  the  observed  conditions 
recur.  As  to  the  presence  of  the  conditions  (which 
really  represent  an  infinity  of  causes)  we  must  be 
mainly  in  the  dark.  Even  the  principles  of  "pure" 
science,  in  which  our  knowledge  reaches  its  maxi- 
mum of  clearness  and  certainty,  cannot  escape  the 
uncertainties  of  misapplication  and  unsuspected  con- 


NATURE    AND    DEITY 


41 


ditions,  and  it  is  with  astonishment  that  we  find  the 
computations  of  a  Levenier  or  a  Fresnel  tallying  with 
the  facts.  And  where  the  conditions,  known  and  un- 
known, are  highly  complex,  as  in  pathology,  history, 
juridical  procedure,  social  economy,  we  must  con- 
tent ourselves  in  the  main  with  a  mere  probability. 
But  when,  abandoning  principles  known  and  verified 
(vcrcE  causce),  and  fields  of  knowledge  with  which 
we  are  more  or  less  familiar,  we  assume  such  knowl- 
edge of  the  modes,  methods,  or  ends  of  universal  be- 
ing as  to  infer  with  a  confidence  which  asks  for  no 
verification  tht'it  righteousness  must  necessarily  tri- 
umph, or  that  this  terrestrial  life  will  be  supplemented 
by  a  life  in  which  all  inequalities  will  be  adjusted, 
and  all  sulTering  compensated,  we  abandon  the  iield 
of  science  and  legitimate  inference  and  assume  little 
less  than  omniscience.  Such  conclusions  are  to  be 
reached,  if  at  all,  not  by  direct  inference  from  the 
general  character  of  the  universal  life,  but  b}'  mediate 
conclusion  based  on  a  study  of  the  particular  con- 
ditions of  our  particular  human  life.  No  deductions 
may  be  made  from  infinity.  It  is  the  unexplored  deep 
to  which  all  knowledge  leads,  but  in  which  all  knowl- 
edge fades  and  characterization  fails.  We  may  sym- 
bolize the  infinite  by  the  more  impressive  of  its  finite 
phases.  We  may  put  the  known  for  both  the  known 
and  the  vast  unknown  in  which  all  knowledire  mertres, 
but  the  universal  reality,  or  that  which  we  represent 
by  the  phrase,  nuist  be  conceived,  from  the  very 
wealth  (jf  its  attributes,  as  in  its  lujinversalitv  untle- 
termimcl  and  undefined — a  jiremiss  transcending   all 


42  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

definite  knowledge,  and  from  which  no  definite  infer- 
ence can  be  drawn.  The  unencom passed  reality  be- 
comes indeed,  representatively  or  symbolically,  an 
object  of  thought,  but  the  being  of  the  object  still 
overmasters  or  transcends  our  thought;  thought  never 
traverses  this  reality.  And  we  mark  our  sense  of  this 
transcendence  by  such  terms  as  the  Infinite,  the  Uni- 
versal, the  Absolute.  Somewhere  our  thought  must 
pause.  Beginning  with  the  finite,  it  reaches  no  ter- 
minal, and  notes  by  a  symbol,  as  it  were  in  despair, 
both  its  own  exhaustion  and  the  reality  which  it  must 
leave  untraversed. 

But  a  more  definite  symbolism  is  demanded  by  the 
processes  of  religious  thought  and  the  needs  of  relig- 
ious feeling.  As  the  submersion  of  all  determinations 
in  the  indeterminate  extinguishes  thought,  infinite 
being,  to  maintain  a  place  in  our  thoughts,  must  be 
represented  by  some  more  or  less  determinate  and 
interesting  aspect  of  being.  Undiscriminated  being 
— to  refer  to  the  Hegelian  dialectic — is  undistinguish- 
able  in  thought  from  no-thing.  Some  type  or  symbol 
drawn  from  the  finite  manifestations  of  the  infinite 
is  therefore  a  necessity  of  thought,  and  religious 
thought,  following  the  religious  interest,  conceives 
or  symbolizes  the  infinite  as  infinite  power  or  intel- 
ligence or  wisdom  or  goodness.  And  so  long  as 
the  mind  moves  freely  among  the  special  associations 
which  we  cannot  wholly  disengage  from  the  typical 
thought,  here  necessarily  borrowed  from  the  human 
type,  we  need  not  be  betrayed  into  the  metaphysical 
vice  of  incarnating  our  symbols,  or    assume   that  the 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  43 

sign  is  a  sufficient  exposition  of  the  thing  signified. 
Unfortunately,  with  the  special  term  we  commonly 
carry  over  the  special  sense.  Conceiving  of  universal 
power  as  personal,  for  instance,  we  tend  continually 
to  limit  its  action  to  the  scope  of  human  aims  and  to 
weigh  all  nature  in  the  partial  scales  of  human  inter- 
est. Or,  if  we  deny  personality,  and  conceive  of  nat- 
ure as  a  vast  and  complex  machine,  we  interpret  her 
activity  as  at  the  level  of  ordinary  mechanical  ac- 
tion, and  miss  the  inner  vivifying  principle  wliich 
energizes  matter  apparently  the  most  inert.  Thus  we 
come  to  the  study  of  nature  with  a  bias.  The  symbol 
is  treated  as  a  definition,  a  premiss  from  which  all 
that  is  involved  in  the  term  in  its  original  and  partic- 
ular application  may  be  deduced  and  applied  to  uni- 
versal being.  But  if  we  remember  that  universal 
being  cannot  be  apprehended  or  defined  as  a  whole, 
that  in  the  idea  of  the  infinite  we  should  look  for  the 
vanishing-point  rather  than  the  starting  point  of 
thought,  we  may  use  such  symbols  as  the  nature  of 
our  thought  or  the  method  of  our  approach  to  the 
infinite  suggests.  Here,  seeking  for  a  basis  in  the 
known  or  knowable  as  the  only  basis  upon  which 
we  can  build  a  rational  theory  of  religion,  we  con- 
ceive tlu'  motions  of  the  infinite,  or  of  such  aspects 
of  the  infinite  as  are  olTered  to  human  apprehension 
and  interpretable  tinough  law,  under  the  type  of  vital 
or  organic  action.  The  present  utility,  at  hast,  of 
such  a  symbol,  is  indisputable.  It  avoids,  on  the  one 
hand,  \hv  jnrpK'xing  implications  which  it  seems 
impossible  to  disentangle  from  the  mure  specific  idea 


44  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

of  personality  as  applied  to  being  in  general;  and  it 
precludes  the  assumption,  on  the  other  hand,  that 
nature  in  the  vast  realm  of  the  so-called  inorganic 
and  inanimate  world  is  without  inner  deterimination 
or  even  the  suggestion  of  life.  And  its  fitness  is  al- 
ready recognized.  From  the  time  of  Xenophanes  the 
continuit}^  and  solidarity  of  universal  being  is  a  theme 
which  has  never  been  abandoned  in  ohilosophical 
thought. 

But  we  are  not  restricted,  let  it  be  said,  to  this  or 
to  any  particular  symbol.  As  no  given  symbol  may 
be  taken  as  an  adequate  expression  of  the  reality, 
we  are  free  to  choose  such  form  of  expression  as  in 
any  case  is  truest  to  our  thought.  And  in  religion, 
we  should  remember,  the  instinct  of  language  obeys 
mainly  the  suggestion  of  the  emotions,  and  philos- 
ophy may  not  assume  to  chide  religion  for  giving  ex- 
pression to  the  feelings  inspired  by  the  infinite  reality 
in  such  terms  as  it  is  constrained  to  employ.  But 
philosophy  indeed, by  showing  the  incommensurabil- 
ity of  language  or  thought  with  the  universal  object 
of  thought,  helps  to  maintain  this  freedom.  It  teaches 
us  that  no  name  or  phrase  by  which  we  seek  to  ex- 
press the  ineffable  may  be  assumed  to  be  sufficient 
or  final.  It  makes  for  religious  freedom,  therefore, 
as  agains*^  those  advocates  of  religion  who,  clinging 
to  the  names  and  forms  and  transient  phases  of  relig- 
ion, miss  its  substance;  against  the  Christian  who 
forgets  that  the  spirit  of  Christ  may  dw^ell  in  men 
who  do  not  take  on  the  name  of  Christ;  against  the 
worshiper  of  Jahveh  for  whom  Ormuzd,  Allah,  Tao, 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  45 

Brahma,  Vishnu,  Rudra,  Zeus,  are  all  false  gods. 
For  the  infinite  as  for  the  finite  the  form  of  expression 
is  indeed  not  indilTerent.  Feeling,  however  deep  or 
subtle,  is  related  to  language  by  certain  laws.  But 
these  are  inner,  not  external  or  conventional  laws; 
and  philosophy,  in  exposing  the  vice  or  futility  of  the 
arbitrary  law,  does  but  aid  religion  in  attaining  to  a 
freer  and  therefore  more  prefect  expression  of  the 
essential  matter  of  religion.  At  difi"erent  periods  and 
with  the  varying  attitudes  of  the  soul  the  symbol  will 
change.  But  for  the  present  needs  of  religious  phi- 
losophy, which  suffers  on  the  one  hand  from  the  habit 
of  compressing  all  natural  action  to  the  measure  of 
human  standards  or  the  scope  of  human  aims,  and 
from  a  tendency  on  the  other  hand  to  harden  our  in- 
terpretation of  nature  into  some  mechanical  theory, 
it  would  seem  that  no  symbol  of  the  universal  energy, 
as  it  offers  itself  to  our  apprehension  and  considera- 
tion, is  truer  or  more  fitting,  so  far  as  it  goes,  than 
that  of  a  universal  life. 


IV. 

The  great  Idea  baffles  wit, 
Language  falters  under  it, 
It  leaves  the  learned  in  the  lurch; 
Nor  art,  nor  power,  nor  toil  can  find 
The  measure  of  the  eternal  Mind, 
Nor  hymn,  nor  prayer,  nor  church. 

— Emerson, 

We  have  found,  now,  a  form  or  type  of  being 
under  which,  as  under  a  natural  symbol,  we  may 
represent  to  ourselves  the  form  of  being  generally. 
In  the  diversity  of  nature  we  apprehend  a  living 
unity.  That  is  to  say,  the  interrelation  of  parts  and 
the  interplay  of  forces  which  we  find  specifically  ex- 
emplified in  animal  and  plant,  or  in  the  modes  of  be- 
ing called  in  the  specific  sense  organic,  may  be 
observed,  in  a  more  general  sense,  in  nature  at  large. 
Nothing  is  isolated.  Each  particular  thing  is  related 
to  all  and  exchanges  infiuence  with  the  universe  of 
things.  Nature  coheres  by  an  immanent  or  inherent 
vital  law. 

This  fundamental  idea  of  nature  as  an  organic  unity 
is  yet  too  general,  however,  to  satisfy  the  demands 
of  religious  feeling  or  religious  thought.  It  olTers  a 
means,  a  rational  symbol,  by  which  to  represent  the 
general  being  of  nature  as  an  object  of  thought,  and 
is  more  or  less  consciously^  present,  no  doubt,  in  the 
sympathetic    thrill  which   runs   through    the   soul   in 

46 


NATURE   AND    DEITY  47 

contemplation  of  nature.  But  religion  deals  with 
relations  more  specific  than  the  general  relation  of 
all  things  to  all.  So  far,  we  have  arrived  at  no  more 
than  the  vaguest  pantheism,  with  which  the  religious 
sense  refuses  to  be  content  because  of  its  vagueness, 
because  of  its  insufficience  to  account  for  the  moral 
and  other  ideal  aims  from  which  we  feel  that  religion 
hereafter  can  never  be  divorced.  The  life  of  nature, 
if  it  may  be  religiously  interpreted,  must  be  inter- 
preted as  in  some  special  relation  to  the  fundamental 
laws  of  the  inner  human  life,  which  cannot  be  relig- 
ious unless  it  is  first  of  all  a  moral  life.  Nature  can- 
not be  construed  in  the  religious  sense  unless  she  be 
construed  as  in  some  necessary  relation  to  the  moral 
sense. 

In  the  theories  generally  current  the  relation  of 
our  inner  life  to  the  life  of  nature  is  but  little  studied, 
nature  being  regarded  as  but  the  secondary  manifes- 
tation of  a  Power  whom  we  know  more  directly 
through  the  soul,  and  who  alone,  to  the  exclusion  of 
all  merely  natural  being,  is  the  inspiration  of  the  re- 
ligious life.  Room  is  thus  given  for  the  play  of  every 
arbitrary  tendency  of  thought,  and  the  fundamental 
religious  idea  is  delivered  over  to  a  riot  of  instincts, 
emotions,  and  unrestrained  fancies.  Protest  from 
the  point  of  view  of  the  facts  is  treated  as  irrelevant. 
Nature,  it  is  argued,  is  not  all.  She  is  but  a  hv- 
product  of  the  divine  activity,  and  tlu*  great  Artificer 
may  have  attributes  of  which  wv  see  no  hint  in  his 
art.  And  if  aught  is  lacking  in  natin^e  it  argues  no 
defect  in  licr  Original.    \\ C  havt"  subjt^ctive  evidence 


48  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

which  outweighs  a  whole  universe  of  external  fact. 
Nature  may  be  cold,  but  God  is  pitiful;  man  may  be 
inhuman,  but  God  is  humane;  life  may  be  full  of  in- 
juiy,  but  the  life  of  God  hereafter  will  wipe  out  the 
memory  of  injustice.  Nature,  in  short,  is  fragment- 
ary and  transient.  Or  she  is  a  specious  illusion. 
The  intercourse  of  the  spirit  is  with  the  eternal  invis- 
ible Spirit,  the  universal  Creator.  And  this  spiritual 
relation,  it  is  averred,  is  in  an  eminent  sense  a  per- 
sonal relation. 

But  this  habit  of  referring  the  life  of  nature  to  an 
extraneous  spiritual  and  personal  life  seems  really  to 
be  but  a  later  phase  of  an  ancient  tendency  to  per- 
sonify nature  herself.  And  in  childhood,  in  poetry, 
and  in  that  natural  religious  feeling  which  has  its  seat 
deeper  than  the  schematism  of  the  intellect,  we  tend 
yet  to  read  into  nature's  lineaments  the  lines  of  our 
own  personality.  But  the  diction  of  poetry,  fine  as 
are  its  discriminations,  is  governed  mainly  by  emo- 
tional and  aesthetic  considerations;  the  poet's  inter- 
est in  matters  of  fact  is  determined  by  the  artistic 
value  of  the  fact.  Religion,  too,  it  may  be  said  is 
idealistic  and  emotional;  its  language  is  the  language 
of  feeling.  And  yet,  unless  the  feeling,  whether 
poetical  or  religious,  is  determined  wholly  by  sub- 
jective considerations,  unless  it  is  a  mere  process  of 
make-believe  in  which  the  critical  habit  is  quenched 
because  we  are  constitutionallj'  di.sposed  to  a  certain 
form  of  self-delusion,  it  implies  certain  objective  re- 
lations of  fact:  there  is  in  nature  that  which  inspires 
this  feeling.     And  if,  unconvinced  that    religion  has 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  49 

no  more  than  such  merely  subjective  basis,  we  allow 
that  there  must  be  some  natural  and  objective  source 
of  religious  inspiration,  the  intimate  relations  which 
we  thuii  sustain  towards  nature  need  interpretation, 
and  become  a  subject  of  philosophical  inquiry'. 

Is  there,  then,  any  intelligible  sense  in  which  these 
relations,  as  conceived  in  the  religious  sense,  may 
be  construed  as  personal,  and  by  consequence  moral? 
If  nature  i.s  to  be  regarded  as  her  own  original,  and 
the  continent  of  all  that  is,  in  what  manner,  if  at  all, 
may  personal  or  moral  attrilmtes  be  ascribed  to  the 
life  or  power  of  nature  conceived  as  an  object  of  re- 
ligious contemplation? 

In  personality  we  must  include,  it  would  seem, 
consciousness,  and  the  question  becomes  more  defi- 
ni'te,  and  brings  us  perhaps  nearer  to  the  heart  of  the 
m.atter,  if  we  ask  ourselves.  Is  nature  conscious? 
The  question  is  not,  let  it  be  noted,  whether  nature 
is  as  truly  conscious  in  the  forms  which  we  ordinarily 
consider  inorganic,  inanimate,  and  unconscious  as  in 
the  forms  of  being  called,  distinctivel}',  conscious — 
in  the  attraction  of  the  magnet,  for  instance,  as  in  the 
afliniiies  of  the  human  mind.  But,  conceiving  of 
natiu'e  generally  and  compreh.cnsivel}' — so  far,  that 
is,  as  nature  in  general  is  ajiprehended  by  ourselves 
— is  it  a  conscious  process,  we  ask,  by  which  what 
we  have  called  the  general  organic  acliviiy  of  nature, 
in  which  the  special  activities  of  mind  and  matter 
are  all  includi'd,  produces  the  special  modes  of  being, 
organic  (in  the  sjiccilic  sense)  and  inorganic,  con- 
scious and  unconscious?  Is  the  general  life  of  nature, 
in  other  words,  a  conscious  life? 


50  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

Consciousness,  in  the  strict  sense,  is  a  highly  spec- 
ialized state  of  being  arising  under  special  conditions. 
It  may  be  roughly  defined,  perhaps,  as  organized 
sensibility.  Its  raw  material,  at  least,  consists  largely, 
if  not  wholl}^,  of  sensuous  impressions,  and  it  pre- 
supposes therefore  the  peculiar  mechanism  of  the 
senses.  To  ascribe  consciousness  in  this  sense  to 
nature,  accordingly,  is  as  if  we  should  endow  her 
with  sight,  or  hearing,  or  any  special  form  of  sensu- 
ous impressibility.  But  for  aught  we  know,  it  may 
be  said,  there  is  a  form  of  consciousness  wholly  in- 
dependent of  the  conditions  which  determine  it  for 
ourselves,  and  a  consciousness  superior  to  our  own 
for  the  very  reason  that  it  is  free  from  the  limitations 
of  our  sensibility.  And  so  there  might  be  anything 
whatever.  Nothing  can  be  inferred  from  a  mere 
abstract  possibility  of  this  sort.  Our  hypotheses  should 
at  least  start  from  the  ground  of  experience,  or,  rea- 
soning from  the  unknown  to  the  unknown,  we  fall 
into  that  speculative  abyss  of  "neither  sea,  nor  shore, 
nor  air,  nor  fire,"  to  which  religious  philosophy  too 
generally  tends,  and  in  which  all  guesses,  all  possi- 
bilities are  on  the  same  indifferent  footing.  And  con- 
sciousness is  a  term  too  specific,  it  would  seem,  to  be 
applied  without  relaxation  of  its  strict  significance  to 
the  general  impressibility  of  nature.  Analogies  or 
"correspondences"  there  are  indubitably  between 
this  impressibility  and  the  impressibility  of  sense. 
But  the  unity  of  the  life  which  pervades  the  univer- 
sal reality  is  so  complete  that  a  lively  fancy  may  de- 
tect such  correspondences     wherever  it   alights,  and 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  5 1 

SO  overwork  its  analoc^ies  as  to  reduce  all  diiTerences 
to  a  fundamental  identity,  or  characterless  unity  like 
that  of  the  Eleatic  One.   This  underlying   unity  does 
not  eilace    the  qualities  and  individuality  of   specific 
things;   nor  does  it  convert  their   specific   characters 
on  the  other  hand,  into  attributes  of  the  general  being 
as  such.      Each     parcicular     thing,    human    or   non- 
human,  though  rooted  in  eternal  being,  is  what  it  is; 
its  attributes,    though    a   process   or   creation    of   the 
eternal  life,  are  in  their  specific  distinctness  its  own. 
And  there  appears  to    be  no   ground   for   identifying 
our  human    consciousness  with  anything  that  we  can 
call  an  attribute  of  nature  in  general,  that  is,  of  nature 
so  far  as  we  may  legitimately  generalize  her  illimita- 
ble being.      Or  if  we  cannot   escape   the    conviction 
that  there  is  in  nature  that  which  in  ourselves,  though 
with  a  ditTerence,  is  conscious  thought,  or  that  which 
corresponds    to    our   conscious    thought,    the    human 
attribute  must  be    regarded,  it    should    seem,  as   spe- 
cific and  in  a  real  sense  unique,  or  as  a  peculiar  and 
singular  case  of  an  attribute  which  only  in  a  broadly- 
generalized  sense  can  be   considered  as   an    attribute 
of  nature  in  general.    Nevertheless,  assuming,  as  we 
have    assumed,  that    the    human    mind    is   developed 
within  the  sphere  and  from  the  source  of  nature,  there 
is  justification  for  the  tendency  to  see  in    nature    the 
rellection,  as  it    were,  of   tlie    attiibutes    of   our   own 
personality.      l!^ach    natural    tiling,    or   quality    of   a 
thing,  being  a  spi>cial    rfii-ct  of    nature  in    general  as 
the  cause,  must  be  contained,  in  a  sense,  or  accounted 
for    in  tlie  cause;   and  yet,  for  llie    reasons   assigned. 


52  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

it  must  be  distinguished  from  the  cause.  And  the 
special  characters  which  constitute  the  human  con- 
sciousness that  which  it  is  are  so  highly  specialized 
that  to  insist  in  any  rigorous  sense  on  the  presence 
of  the  human  attribute  in  the  general  being  of  nature 
would  invite  confusion  rather  than  assist  our  thought. 
Humanity,  though  springing  from  nature,  cannot, 
any  more  than  any  other  natural  effect,  be  qualita- 
tivel}"  identified  with  nature  the  universal  cause.  We 
are  a  differentiated  product  of  nature. 

And  if  we  hold  ourselves  to  anything  like  the  strict- 
ness of  language  which  is  indispensable  to  scientific 
procedure,  what  is  here  said  of  consciousness  gen- 
erally may  be  said  also  of  the  particular  forms, 
sensitive  or  active,  of  conscious  life.  The  mind, 
as  characteristic  of  man  or  of  the  animals  to  which 
we  are  willing  to  allow  a  mental  life,  is  associated 
with  specific  organs,  and  varies  in  complexity 
or  power  with  the  variations  in  the  structure  of  such 
organs.  And  where  such  special  organs  are  wanting, 
the  phenomena  of  mind,  in  their  special  significance, 
are  wanting.  It  were  as  reasonable  therefore,  fol- 
lowing the  observed  analogies  of  physical  structure 
and  mental  life,  to  search  universal  nature  for  an 
eye  or  a  brain  as  to  ascribe  to  nature  generally  the 
specific  characters  of  the  human  mind. 

But  the  stream,  it  may  be  said,  cannot  rise  higher 
than  its  source.  And  if  we  assume  no  substratum  of 
mind  in  the  activity  of  nature,  how  may  we  see  di- 
vinity in  nature,  or  any  attribute  which  constrains 
ihe  thinking  soul  to  a  religious  attitude,  or  inspires 
us  with  awe?     She  is  degraded,  it  would  seem,  to  a 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  53 

level  below  the  human  and  even  below  the  brutish 
plane.  The  endless  reaches  of  being  before  which 
the  soul  surrenders  its  last  vestige  of  pride  ofTer  us, 
on  this  assumption,  one  may  say,  but  the  multiplica- 
tion of  senseless  atoms,  and  man,  sensitive  and  con- 
scious, is  superior  to  universal  nature,  impersonal 
and  unconscious.  Though  the  product  of  nature,  he 
has  bettered  his  origin.  Apparently'  the  stream  is 
higher  than  its  source. 

The  error  here  lies  in  ignoring  the  solidarity  of 
nature  and  confounding  the  general  being  of  nature 
with  certain  specific  objects  which  we  mentally  dis- 
sociate from  her  pervasive  energy.  On  the  grad- 
uated scale  by  which  we  mark  oil  the  foims  of  being 
as ''higher"  or  lower"  the  comparison  is  restricted 
to  individuals,  or  to  particular  tNpes  of  being,  and,  as 
the  series  is  arranged  \\  ith  reference  to  man  as  the 
standard,  the  further  vve  recede  from  the  human  type, 
as  from  man  to  the  polyp,  the  lower  vve  appear  to 
descend.  Man  is  left  in  undisputed  preeminence. 
And  if  the  line  is  prolonged  beyond  the  limit  of  sen- 
sation, through  the  vegetal  series,  and  until  life 
itself  in  the  special  sense  disappears,  vve  seem  to  de 
scend  still  further,  and  matter  mechanic,  insensate, 
the  vast  aggregation  of  inorganic  objects  tvpititd  by 
the  clod,  is  found  lying  at  the  very  base.  By  this 
manner  of  approacli  nature  is  indeed  degraded  to  a 
plane  below  tluit  of  man's  svlf-conscious  intelligence. 
The  transition  from  man  to  nature  is  here,  of  neces- 
sity, a  descent.  And  nature  in  this  aspect  n)a\- 
inspire,  perhaps,  no  rrligious  awe. 


54  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

But  comparison  of  this  sort   is  misleading  from  the 
beginning.      Nature  in  the  religious  sense,  nature  in 
her  unity,  is  ignored.      It  is  a  mere  appraisement   of 
the  several    (-bjects  of  nature  as  set  over  one  against 
the  other,  and  diverts  attention    completely  from   the 
general  being  of  nature  of  which  they    are   severally 
the  products.      Such  an  assignment  of  values   has  its 
use,  of  course,  in  the  refinement  and  extension  of  our 
knowledge.    Science  must  abstract,  particularize,  and 
define.      And  it  must  apply  special   standards   to   the 
special  matter  of  its  investigations.      But  the  compar- 
ison of  man  with  nature,  in  any  sense  germane  to  re- 
ligious thought,  is  not  a  comparison  of  man  with  the 
isolated  objects  of  nature.   The  superficial  lines  traced 
by  the  point  of  sight  as  the  bounds  or  barriers   of  in- 
dividual things,  the  units   of  life  or  power  which  we 
mentally  dissociate    and  vest  with    independence,  all 
the  forms  and  elements  which  we  find  by  disintegra- 
tion of  the  being  of  the  natural   world,    are   resolved 
again,  in  the  religious   view,  into   the   general   body 
of  nature — and  comparison  fails.   We  cannot  measure 
ourselves  as   against   the    immeasurable.      Man   may 
glance  complacently   from   himself    to  the    ape.      As 
between  the  human   brain    and   so    many    ounces    of 
matter,   choose   it   where   we   will,  there   is   nothing 
which  assails  our  pride.      But   neither  man  nor    any 
individual  thing  can  subsist  alone,  or  as   a  mere   ex- 
truded issue   of   the   natural   forces.      Our   lives   are 
shaped  and  nourished    at  every  instant,  and  through 
oacli  minutest    change,  in  nature's  universal   matrix, 
and  the  mind  of  man,  which    we  would  impose  upon 


NATURE    4ND    DEITY  55 

nature  as  her  standard,  is  itself  conditioned  and  pre- 
served by  her  ever-active  energy.  He  is  the  creature: 
she  is  the  creator.  His  is  the  evanescent  thought: 
she  is  the  eternal  reality,  the  origin,  the  object,  and 
the  sustenance  of  his  thought.  To  the  religious  mind, 
man  himself,  the  measurer  and  critic  of  nature,  ap- 
pears as  a  phase  of  nalure.  His  particular  being,  in 
body  and  in  mind,  is  an  outcome  of  her  universal 
energy. 

And  in  this  all-pervasive  energy  man  finds — distin- 
guishing his  particular  being  from  the  being  of  nat- 
ure— not  indeed  his  counterpart,  or  his  own  familiar 
attributes  reduplicated  in  large,  but  activities  which, 
as  we  have  said,  bear  a  certain  analogy  to  his  own 
conscious  activity.  Our  anthropomorphism  is  not 
wholly  unmeaning.  Conscious  intelligence  com- 
putes, for  instance,  the  motions  of  the  planets.  But  in 
the  moving  orbs  themselves,  in  the  energy  which 
through  eternity  guides  their  motions  with  certainty 
so  absolute,  is  there  not  a  principle  as  exalted  as  the 
intelligence  of  a  Kepler  or  a  Newton,  who  but  sees 
and  records  tlie  inelTal)le  wonder  which  yet  endures 
when  the  human  facuhy  is  qu^Miched?  Nay,  in  the 
structure  of  a  Kaf,  in  tlie  initlescence  of  a  slu'll, 
in  the  forces  that  shape  a  crystal,  there  is  that 
which  tries  the  conscious  wit  of  man  to  follow  and 
define.  And  is  it  a  mere  misnomrr  to  name  tlie 
formative  princijile  of  which  these  are  but  special 
clTects,  itself  intcIUctuaL  'i'lie  principle  wliich 
dir«'ets  the  mind  of  man  iis  olisi-i  vrr  must  be  distin- 
gui^h<*d,  of  conrs(\  from    thr    piiiieiplo  which  main- 


56  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

tains  m  its  order  and  relations  che  actuality  ob- 
served. But  the  analogy  is  too  obvious  to  be  ignored, 
and  it  is  in  obedience  to  the  instincts  out  of  which 
language  grows  that  we  mark  it  by  an  identity  of 
names.  And  the  religious  mind,  the  mind  which  is 
sensitive,  that  is,  to  the  profounder  relations  which 
unite  things  dissimilar,  and  feels  instinctively  for  the 
fibers  which  root  the  finite  in  the  infinite,  is  little 
likely  to  exalt  the  special  directive  principle  or  delib- 
erative intelligence  in  man  above  what  we  may  call 
the  intelligence  of  fact,  the  creative  intelligence  in 
nature  which  shapes  each  individual  thing  in  its  dis- 
tinction, and  of  which  the  conscious  preventative 
thought  of  man  may  at  most  be  conceived  as  but  a 
special  and  transitory  mode.  Our  common  thought 
goes  no  deeper  than  the  surface,  and  is  embarrassed 
by  the  miultitude  of  divisions  and  distinctions  patent 
on  the  body  of  nature.  And  we  assume,  upon  this 
superficial  view,  a  certain  superiority  in  the  reflective 
human  consciousness.  But  what  is  our  science  in 
comparison  with  the  reality  which  it  studies?  Is  our 
geology  more  than  the  earth,  or  our  astronom}^  supe- 
rior to  the  stars?  In  the  petty  scales  b}^  which  we  are 
fain  to  determine  values  absolutel}/  the  worth  of  man's 
discursive  thought,  to  man  himself  invaluable,  may 
seem  to  the  shallow  or  irreverent  to  transcend  the 
worth  of  an  infinity  not  essentially  human.  But  in 
the  broader  view  to  which  the  religious  thought  in- 
clines we  see  the  madness  of  this  conceit.  Compared 
with  the  strong  and  wide-reaching  web  of  existence 
man's    thought  is  but  a  knot  of  fragile  threads,  trail- 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  57 

ing  a  little  way  from  loop  to  loop  and  par^^ed  by  any 
accident.  And  shall  our  frailly  measure  omnipotence  ? 
Small  need  to  ask  the  soul  once  touched  by  the  sense 
of  things  infinite  whether  our  little  lives,  rounded 
with  a  sleep,  are  lower  or  higher  than  the  all-pervad- 
ing life.  The  mortal  mind  is  abashed  by  immortal 
universal  being.  Though  nature  ma}'  contain — if  vve 
are  bold  enough  to  assume  it  so — no  several  thing 
higher  than  the  intellect  of  man,  both  the  thinker  and 
the  object  of  his  thought,  the  seer  and  all  that  he 
sees,  are  created  and  sustained  b}^  nature.  She  is  the 
life  in  which  our  intellectual  life  is  but  an  infinitesimal 
element,  a  momentary  phase.  It  is  through  the  modes 
of  our  self-conscious  activity,  nevertheless,  that  we 
must  perforce  interpret  the  modes  of  natural  action. 
Of  our  human  attributes  we  frame  our  thought  of 
nature;  by  these,  as  intimations  or  symbols,  we  are 
fain  to  define  our  mental  attitude  or  the  manner  of 
our  approach  to  to  the  miracle  of  universal  being. 
But  nature,  not  less  or  lower  than  her  arrogant  creat- 
ure man,  infinitely  transcends  our  thought.  In  the 
infinite  reality  thought  is  lost.  And  the  finite  mind, 
lost  in  the  infinite,  is  filled  with  awe;  its  attitude  is 
worship. 


V. 


No  man  will  hinder  thee  from  living  according  to  the  reason  of  thy 
own  nature:  nothing  will  happen  to  thee  contrary  to  the  reason  of  the 
universal  nature.-  -Marcus  Aurelius  Antoninus. 

Wirke,  so  viel  du  willst,  du  stehest  doch  ewig  allein  da, 
Bis  an  das  All  die  Natur  dich,  die  gewaltige,  kniipft. 

— Schiller. 

The  power  in  nature,  it  appears,  may  be  conceived 
as  manifesting  in  a  certain  sense  attributes  of  our  hu- 
manity. We  may  even  call  the  impressibility  of  nature 
a  form  of  consciousness;  in  fact,  as  shutting  out  of 
view  the  universality  and  delicacy  of  this  impressi- 
bility, it  were  a  kind  of  untruth  to  say  absolutely  that 
nature  is  unconscious.  By  some  means  nature  takes 
account  of,  or  reacts  to,  each  particular  event,  even 
the  most  secret  human  thought,  and  if  we  and  all  men 
had  the  chemist's  or  physicist's  familiarity  with  the 
intimate  life  of  nature  doubtless  we  should  say,  reflect- 
ing in  our  common  language  the  common  thought, 
that  nature  knows  each  event.  And  it  were,  to  say 
the  least,  as  reasonable  thus  to  impute  consciousness 
to  nature  as  to  shut  our  eyes  to  an  obvious  analogy, 
and  subject  all  nature  to  the  tyranny  of  a  "blind  ne- 
cessit}^"  a  deity  hypostatized  from  the  abstractions 
of  mechanics,  and  really  as  external  as  Fate  or  Provi- 
dence. Yet  the  analogy  is  not  more  than  an  analog}'. 
The  human  function  and  the  more  general  function 

58 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  59 

of  nature  are  not  the  same,  and  though  a  riper  sci- 
ence may  reduce  the  diilerences  which  to  us  seem  to 
separate  them  so  widely,  and  exhibit  the  conscious 
intelligence  of  man  as  a  particular  case  of  the  uni- 
versal responsiveness  of  nature,  the  specific  human 
function  must  always  be  marked  by  specific  charac- 
ters, characters  which  cannot  be  transferred  to  the 
more  general  function  whatever  the  tricks  that  lan- 
guage may  play  upon  our  thought. 

And  what  we  have  said  of  intelligence  and  con- 
sciousness will  serve  as  an  illustration  of  the  extended 
application  which  we  may  give  to  terms  borrowed 
from  the  moral  life  of  man.  We  may  see  in  nature 
justice,  for  instance,  or  wisdom,  or  parental  love. 
But  if,  yielding  to  the  seductions  of  language,  which 
tempts  us  to  assume  in  the  shifting  content  of  thought 
the  definiteness  of  things,  we  forget  that  a  term  when 
pressed  beyond  its  strict  and  special  application  must 
lose  much  of  its  original  import,  we  must  surely  be 
misled.  We  can  set  no  fast  limits,  nevertheless,  to 
the  expansibility  of  our  terms.  To  a  susceptible  spirit, 
poetical  or  religious,  contact  with  nature  may  be  felt, 
for  instance,  as  personal  contact.  lUit  in  interpreting 
the  sense  in  which  the  idea  of  personality  may  legit- 
imately receive  this  general  application,  we  tiiul  tliat 
the  sense  is  necessarily  much  relaxed.  Sometliing 
in  the  general  being  of  nature  impresses  us  as  we  are 
impressed  l)y  the  attributes  of  humanity.  But  the 
impressions  thus  received  are  vague — thougli  llie 
rmrUinnrd  result  mav  be  unmistakable — and  the  Ian- 
guage  in  which    they    are    expressed,    sharing    their 


6o  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

vagueness,  cannot  serve  the  purposes  of  definition; 
nor  can  we  combine  qualities  so  vaguely  apprehended 
into  a  distinct  or  deiined  personality,  or  deduce  from 
such  qualities,  as  we  might  deduce  the  acts  of  a  man 
from  the  characer  of  the  man,  particular  conclusions 
as  to  the  actual  course  of  nature  in  the  government  of 
the  world.  Such  personal  attributes,  so  assigned  to 
universal  being,  do  not  represent  general  laws,  or 
true  inductions  drawn  in  scientific  or  ordinary  logical 
form  from  observed  and  correlated  facts  of  being. 
They  indicate  a  point  of  view.  And  their  value, 
which  only  a  cold  heart  will  dispute,  is  emotional 
rather  than  intellectual,  save  as  the  intellect  may  ac- 
count for  our  emotions. 

But  if  the  idea  of  personality  cannot  be  applied  to 
nature  in  any  but  this  general  and  analogical  sense, 
how  may  we  hope  to  find  in  nature  a  basis  for  the 
principles  of  practice,  that  is,  for  religion  as  an  im- 
perative law  of  conduct?  Can  nature  be  impersonal 
and  yet  moral?  Or  if  nature  is  not  moral  in  a  defi- 
nitely human  sense,  how  can  she  be  conceived  as  the 
source  of  human  morals?  The  moral  law  must  be 
accounted  for.  The  foundations  of  morality  are  so 
detp— so  at  least  we  may  fairly  assume  from  the  uni- 
versality of  moral  distinctions — that  it  seems  impos- 
sible to  legard  its  laws  as  mere  conventions;  and  if 
they  are  in  truth  more  than  social  conventions,  and 
nature  nevertheless  is  not  in  an}^  strict  sense  either 
personal  or  moral,  whence  do  they  drive  their  force? 

The  Stoics,  who  held  to  the  Socratic  idea  that  the 
true  law  of  life  is  that  which  reduces  the  elements  of 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  6 I 

life  to  harmony  or  unity,  felt  the  same  necessity  which 
here  presses  upon  ourselves.  The  ethical  end,  it 
seemed  to  them,  must  be  of  more  than  merely  human 
prescription.  And  seeing  in  nature  a  rational  prin- 
ciple shaping  the  matter  of  nature  in  accordance  with 
law,  they  believed  that  theethical  law  might  be  stated 
with  greater  breadth  and  force  if  the  harmonj-  which 
it  induces  in  the  soul  were  regarded  as  "harmoniz- 
ing" the  soul  at  the  same  time  with  the  rational  prin- 
ciple so  discerned  in  nature.  But  the  truth  thus 
adumbrated  their  merely  practical  philosophy  could 
not  define.  They  could  not  borrow  a  philosophical 
principle,  of  course,  from  the  Epicureans,  and  had 
not  their  own  highly  developed  and  instinctive  sense 
of  right  impressed  them  with  the  force  of  a  natural 
law,  and  had  not  their  practical  needs  been  more  ur- 
gent than  their  philosophical,  they  would  doubtless 
have  been  more  distinctly  conscious  of  the  insufli- 
ciency  of  their  account  of  the  moral  life  as  a  life  "in 
conformity  with  nature."  The  readiest  explanation 
was  that  nature,  or  the  divine  life  of  which  nature 
was  conceived  as  the  expression,  is  moral;  that  the 
ethical  end  is  at  the  same  time  an  end  of  nature,  or 
of  the  divine  mind,  already  conceived,  after  Anjixa- 
goras,  as  informing  nature  with  a  vaguely  personal 
life.  And  this  interpretation  of  the  natural  ground 
of  the  m(3ral  law  survives,  mutatis  nuituudis^  to  the 
present  day.  Ikit  we  cannot  assume,  shifting  our 
regard  from  nature  in  man  to  nature  in  general,  that 
her  activities  are  directtxl  universallv  to  ethical  ends, 
because  we  cannot  grasp  tlie  linal  aim    of    nature,  or 


62  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

assume  even  that  there  is  such  an  aim.  Nor  does  it 
seem  possible,  if,  mindful  of  the  narrowness  of  our 
outlook,  we  forbear  the  attempt  to  interpret  nature 
as  All,  or  Whole,  or  Absolute,  and  hazard  conclu- 
sions of  no  broader  sweep  than  from  our  little  coigne 
of  vantage  we  have  the  right  to  draw,  to  construe  the 
facts  of  nature  as  we  find  tlicm  into  complete  con- 
formity with  our  moralties.  If  we  apply  to  nature  the 
standards  which  we  apply  to  men,  she  must  often 
seem  indifferent  both  to  ourselves  and  to  the  ends  for 
which  good  men  make  sacrifice.  In  earthquake, 
famine,  and  storm,  we  must  judge  her, if  we  judge  her 
by  the  human  law,  remorselessl}^  cruel;  and  the 
world,  as  if  of  purpose  to  def}^  the  demands  of  our 
morality,  teems  with  creatures  that  seem  formed  ex- 
pressly to  cause  suffering,  that  live  in  fact  by  the  de- 
struction of  sensitive  life.  Nature,  in  morality  as  in 
other  matters,  is  not,  we  must  confess,  conformed 
to  our  standaids,  and  is  as  liberal  of  precedents  for 
our  brutish  acts,  apparently,  as  for  the  sublimest  sac- 
rifices of  human  love.  We  may  take  refuge  again  in 
the  much-worn  argument  from  ignorance.  We  may 
assume  that  in  the  hidden  future,  or  in  the  wide  realm 
of  the  unknown,  the  untoward  facts  which  are  seen 
must  have  their  unseen  counterpoise.  It  is  a  light 
thing,  to  men  of  a  certain  habit  of  thought,  to  take 
so  much  for  granted.  But  we  can  assume  nothing 
from  our  ignorance.  If  we  have  any  clew  to  the  un- 
known it  is  to  be  found  in  that  which  we  know.  And 
the  truth  seems  to  be,  as  we  have  foreshadowed,  that 
in  the   strict   and    human    sense   nature  as   we   have 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  63 

knowledge  cf  her  is  neither  moral  nor  immoral.  We 
may  relax  the  strict  sense,  and  find  nature  moral  in 
an  analogical  or  more  general  sense.  We  may  see 
prudence  or  good  house-keeping  in  the  economy 
which  suflers  no  atom  to  be  \va?;ted  or  lost;  or  eternal 
justice  in  the  relations  of  action  and  reaction,  cause 
and  eilect ;  or  immortal  love  in  the  affinities  of  mat- 
ter, or  in  the  generation  and  sustenance  of  the  myriad 
forms  of  life — though  Empedocles,  it  is  instructive 
to  note,  paired  Love  with  Hate.  Or  looking  with 
modern  eyes  on  natures  evolving  life — a  view  not 
wholly  strange,  however,  to  this  antique  seer  and 
savant — we  may  perceive  in  the  processes  of  terrestrial 
growth  a  continuous  progress  toward  ends  which  are 
in  a  certain  harmony  with  the    moral  end. 

Self-kindled  every  atom  glows, 
And  hints  the  future  which  it  owes. 

But  it  will  scarceJy  be  contended  that  a  system  of 
morals  applicable  to  human  conduct  could  be  derived 
from  the  natural  sciences  or  the  action  of  merely  ex- 
ternal nature.  Moralitv,  as  human  bein<rs  understand 
the  term  in  judging  human  c(jnducr,  has  constant 
reference  to  the  ends  of  human  activity,  and  being 
which  does  not  conform  to  the  human  tvpe  is  not  to 
be  judged  by  the  standards  which  we  apply  to  human 
conduct,  and  alTords  no  ddinite  or  suflicienl  basis  for 
the  construction  of  sucli  standards.  So  far  as  appears, 
humanilv,  high  as  are  its  prerogatives,  is  but  an  in- 
cident in  the  natural  order,  not  its  final  cause  or  end. 
Must  we  then  be  contfuc  to  be  baiUetl  in  our  scaieli 
of  nature  for  a  basi.-;  of  morals?  To  this  complexion, 


64  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

the  theist  may  say,  it  must  come  at  last.  Moral  dis- 
tinctions must  vanish  in  a  philosophy  which  knows 
nothing  but  nature,  and  which  must  represent  every 
impulse,  moral  or  immoral,  as  proceeding  from  the 
same  natural  source.  Vice  is  at  least  as  natural  as 
virtue,  unless,  like  the  Stoics,  we  assume  a  principle 
which  limits  the  natural  to  the  virtuous;  e^'go^  vice 
is  as  well    authenticated  as  virtue. 

But  we  have  gone  too  far  afield.  Moral  good  and 
moral  evil  are,  as  we  have  said,  distinctions  founded 
in  the  nature  of  human  ends;  it  is  nature  working 
in  humanity  that  has  defined  the  moral  law.  And  as 
nature  may  be  studied  only  in  her  works,  it  devolves 
upon  us  now  to  look  w^ithin,  and  to  search  for  the 
general  or  constitutional  ends,  if  any  such  there  be, 
which  are  subserved  by  morality  as  a  means.  The 
difficulties  inherent  in  the  subject, it  must  be  confessed, 
are  not  small.  The  intricacies  of  the  inner  conscious 
life  present  to  our  inspection  relations  even  more 
delicate  and  complex  than  the  relations  of  external 
objects.  Our  constitution  is  marked,  nevertheless,  by 
certain  constitutional  traits,  and  it  may  not  be  impos- 
sible, in  spite  of  inconsistency  and  caprice  and  the 
evanescence  of  our  conscious  states,  that  a  free  and 
patient  study  of  our  nature  may  discover  certain 
general  and  relatively  constant  ends — ends  which  in 
the  e3^es  of  a  reasonable  man  impose  upon  our  con- 
duct a  paramount  law.  And  the  law  by  which  the 
various  activities  of  our  nature  may  be  combined  in 
orderly  and  effective  movement  in  the  direction  of 
such  ends,  if  we  grant  that  such  ends  may  be  found, 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  ^  65 

will  be  for  ourselves  in  an  eminent  sense  a  natural 
law;  the  law  of  nature,  that  is,  to  which  we  as  human 
beings  are  rationally  bound.  Let  us  consider,  then, 
the  evidences  of  such  a  natural  and   rational  law. 

We  pause,  however,  to  clear  up  a  misunderstand- 
ing which  may  arise  as  to  the  moaning  of  the  word 
law.  As  employed  in  the  natural  sciences  it  implies, 
for  the  most  part,  a  generalized  statement  of  fact. 
The  attraction  between  any  two  particles  of  matter, 
we  say,  is  directly  proportional  to  the  product  of  their 
masses  and  inversely  proportional  to  the  square  of 
their  distances  asunder.  And  this  law,  within  the 
sphere  to  which  it  applies,  is  never  violated.  In  fact 
we  regard  inviolability  as  a  characteristic  of  natural 
law.  Is  the  moral  law  thus  inviolable?  We  might 
more  pertinently  ask,  is  it  ever  in  full  of  all  its  de- 
mands complied  with?  Man's  deep  distrust  of  his 
neighbor,  founded  in  long  experience  of  social  life, 
gives  an  air  of  grotesqueness  to  the  suggestion  even 
that  ethical  law  should  l)e  interpreted  as  a  summarized 
description  of  the  actual  conduct  of  any  considerable 
portion  of  mankind.  But  natural  law  is  not  necessa- 
rily the  expression  of  a  completely  actualized  relation 
of  fact.  It  may  express  the  relation  of  means  to  end 
— to  an  end  possibly  never  as  yet  attained.  The  laws 
of  health,  for  instance,  are  the  conditions  governing 
the  attainment  and  preservation  of  a  state  of  the  botlv 
distinjruished  as  normal,  and  have  been  studied  with 
tolerabh'  success,  though  p()ssii)le  a  bodv  in  all  re- 
spects normal  is  never,  or  but  rarelv,  to  be  found. 
The  mind,  resolving  the  actual  into  its   elements,  re- 


66  ,  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

combines  them  into  an  as  yet  unrealized  ideal; 
through  the  imperfections  of  the  actual  man  we  dis- 
cern the  perfections  of  the  man  that  shall  be.  Imagi- 
nation, elaborating  the  material  of  experience,  figures 
in  idea  the  end;  science,  testing  experience,  discloses 
the  means,  which  are  what  we  recognize  as  the  laws 
of  health,  or  of  normal  physical  life.  And  in  a  man- 
ner analogous  to  this,  that  is,  by  idealizing  the  inner 
life,  and  testing  by  experience  the  laws  of  psychic 
growth,  we  learn  the  conditions  made  by  nature  in- 
dispensable to  the  actualization  of  the  spiritual  ideal. 
And  among  these  conditions  we  must  name,  preem- 
inently, fulfillment  of  the  moral  demand.  The  moral 
life  is,  as  in  nature  established,  a  condition  precedent 
to  the  attainment  of  an  ideal  end.  Moral  laws,  ac- 
cordingly, are  natural  laws.  They  express  the  natural 
relation  of  cause  and  effect,  of  means  to  an  end. 

And  the  supreme  importance  of  these  laws,  let  us 
add,  must  arise  from  the  supreme  desirability  of  the 
end  to  which  they  define  the  means.  However  rig- 
orously the  end  were  conditioned  by  the  means,  un- 
less we  were  interested  in  the  end  we  should  regard 
neither  means  nor  end;  and  unless  the  end  were  su- 
preme, there  would  be  no  intelligible  sense  in  which 
the  authority  of  the  moral  laws,  the  means  to  this 
end,  could  be  regarded  as  supreme.  Nature  has  no 
codes  or  formulae  in  which  we  ma}^  read  the  inert 
record  of  her  will.  Her  laws  are  discovered  only  in 
their  operation,  and  a  natural  law  which  is  paramount 
for  us  can  be  recognized  as  such  onl}^  as  we  see  in 
its  fulfillment    necessary  means  to  a  paramount  end. 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  67 

And  here  lies  the  authority  of  the  moral  mandate. 
Without  the  interest  which  we  must  have  in  the  end 
to  be  attained  by  the  moral  life  all  our  acts  would 
stand  on  the  same  footing;  the  sinners  appeal  to  nat- 
ure would  be  as  valid  aS  the  saint's;  for  whether  we 
fultill  the  conditions  of  approximation  to  the  ideal 
type  or  the  conditions  of  reversion  to  the  brutish  type 
we  are  equally  powerless  to  escape  the  universal  em- 
brace of  nature.  It  is  our  interest  which  discrimi- 
nates. And  this  interest  is  organic;  it  is  inherent  in 
the  human  constitution,  a  character  impressed  uni- 
versally by  nature  creative  upon  man  her  creature. 
Many  modes  of  life  are  by  nature  made  possible. 
We  may  be  led  hither  and  thither  as  impulse  uncon- 
trolled or  our  interest  misconceived  happens  to  guide 
us.  But  the  same  sovereign  nature  to  whom  we  owe 
each  instinct  has,  in  the  general  form  of  our  nature, 
determined  for  each  man,  independently  of  errors 
of  judgment  or  vagaries  of  the  will,  a  supreme  inter- 
est or  end,  and  through  this  interest,  conceived  in  its 
fiili  breadth,  has  prescribed  for  each  instinct  its  ra- 
tio i-il  limits,  and  fur  life  as  a  whole  its  supreme  and 
rational  law.  And  it  is  this  law  of  which  we  are  in 
rearch.  Conformity  to  tliis  law  would  be  that  con- 
l"or;ni;v  to  nature  whicli  the  stoics  found  so  dillicult 
I')  jiresent  in  theory,  and  of  which  they  gave  such 
ilhistrious  examples  in  jiractice.  And  upon  this 
law,  if  upon  any  natural  law,  oiu"  ethics  must  be 
founded. 


VI. 


For  that  is,  and  ever  will  be,  the  best  of  sayings,  that  the  useful  is 
the  noble,  and  the  hurtful  the  base. — Plato:  Republic,  ^j/.  Jowett*s 
Translation. 

The  inquiry  here  carries  us  within  the  bounds  of 
psychology.  To  trace  out  the  foundations  of  moral- 
ity is  to  discover  a  principle  which  is  broader  than 
that  of  moral  distinctions.  The  science  of  conduct 
resolves  itself  into  a  particular  phase  of  the  science 
of  human  nature. 

We  assume — not  to  carry  the  inquiry  farther  back 
than  is  necessary  for  our  present  purpose — we  as- 
sume in  our  nature  certain  impulses  or  tendencies  to 
action.  Such  inherent  tendencies  we  observe  even 
in  the  unconscious  life  of  our  system,  and  we  arrive 
at  consciousness  with  an  organization  which^irrespect- 
ive  of  the  particular  direction  which  may  afterwards 
be  given  with  conscious  preference  to  its  activities, 
is  determined  to  actions  of  a  certain  general  kind. 
Man  is  predestined  by  his  structure  to  a  set  of  activ- 
ities different  from  those  of  the  sheep  or  the  tiger. 
But  within  the  limits  to  which  we  are  constitutionally 
restricted  there  is  wide  range  for  variation.  A  form 
or  principle  is  required  by  which,  within  the  range 
allowed  by  the  general  form  of  our  organization,  our 
activities  may  be  determined  more  definitely  in  direc- 
tion and  degree. 

68 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  69 

Such  a  principle  m^^y  be  found,  we  submit,  refer- 
ring the  matter  to  common  experience,  in  the  desire 
for  happiness  or  well-being;  in  the  fundamental  de- 
sire, that  is  to  say,  to  increase  the  several  and  general 
satisfactions  of  life,  and  to  make  life  as  a  whole,  as 
it  progresses,  in  a  completer  sense  worth    the  living. 

Take  some  simple  instance,  the  impulse   to    walk, 
for  example,  or  to  eat  or  drink.      Taking  some   such 
impulse  for  granted,  and    isolating   it,  so   far  as   that 
is  possible,  from  the  general  activit}- of  the  organism, 
we  have  still  a   principle  to  seek   by  which  we    may 
determine  the  time,  place,  occasion,  continuance,  and 
other  circumstances   of   the    act   which   the   impulse 
initiates.    The  principle  of  the  mean,  which  assumes 
a  certain    recognition  of  the    extremes,  may  serve  as 
a  useful  practical  guide,   but   neither   mean    nor   ex- 
tremes can  Idc  discriminated  without  reference  to  some 
relatively  determinate   point    or   standard.      For    the 
virtuous  mean  Aristotle  refers  us  to  the  judgment  of 
the  reasonable  or  prudent  man.    And  we  may  consult 
the  reasonable  man  here.      Until    the  personal   judg- 
ment can  be  reduced  to  quantitative  terms,  or   meas- 
ured by  objective  standards,  the  subjective  or  personal 
factor  cannot  be    eliminated.      Something  is  gained, 
howevi^r,  if  we  can    reduce  the  personal  judgment  to 
lower  or  more  elementary  terms.    And  in  such  cases 
as  we  have    instanced,  at    least,  the    true    or  rati(tn:d 
mean  ajiprars  to    be    established,    in    the    end,  if    we 
disregartl    everything    but    the    natural    and    sjiecitic 
elTt'cts  of  the  isolated  act,  by  the  feelings  of  satisfac- 
tion   or    discontL'ut,    uf    pleasure  oi-    jiain,  assoc:aleil 


70  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

with  or  consequent  upon  the  act  under  consideration. 
The  force  of  analysis  can  as  yet,  perhaps,  no  further 
go.  The  interpretation  of  such  feelings  in  physiolog- 
ical terms,  with  reference,  say, — to  instance  a  re^nt 
hypothesis, — to  the  nutritive  states  of  the  organs  em- 
ployed, would  aid  us  collaterally  in  giving  definite- 
ness  to  our  criterion,  and  might  impart  to  it  something 
of  objective  clearness.  But  though  physiology  has 
done  service  to  psj-chology,  and  promises  to  do  much 
more,  it  is  very  far  as  yet  from  giving  us  a  general 
objective  standard  for  the  comparison  of  pleasures 
and  pains.  We  must  content  ourselves  here  with  the 
introspective  method,  and  the  confirmation  of  its  re- 
sults in  common  experience.  And  a  little  considera- 
tion is  enough  to  convince  us  that,  if  w^e  could  in  any 
case  isolate  the  individual  from  his  fellows,  and  could 
further  restrict  our  attention  to  some  simple  function 
or  some  single  form  of  activity  of  such  individual, the 
point  of  maximum  satisfaction  or  pleasure  would  de- 
termine the  golden  mean  or  the  rational  law  for  that 
particular  case. 

But  no  case  is  so  simple.  No  organ  or  "faculty" 
acts  entirely  alone.  Nor  are  the  faculties  combined 
in  mere  contiguity,  like  a  bundle  of  fagots.  Tl.ey 
act  and  react  one  upon  the  other  in  close  organic 
union,  and  a  question  which  might  be  answered  read- 
ily enough  as  referring  to  a  single  impulse  or  a  simple 
taste  becomes  more  difficult  when  other  tastes  and 
other  impulses,  if  not  the  man  entire,  go  into  the  ac- 
count. The  satisfaction  of  one  impulse  may  be  at 
the  expense  of  another,  or  of  all  the  others,  and  may 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  7 1 

be  modified,  or  even  changed  into  discomfort  or  pain, 
by  the  reactions  it  sets  up.  It  does  not  appear,  how- 
ever, that  the  complexity  of  the  functions  of  an  indi- 
vidual life  changes  the  general  principle  established 
for  the  simpler  case.  The  fixed  point  or  standard  is 
merely  shifted  to  the  position  which  is  marked  by 
the  highest  satisfaction  resulting  from  the  play  of  the 
functions  as  a  whole.  A  man  indulges  his  appetite, 
for  instance,  with  some  reference  directly  to  the  sense 
of  taste,  but  mainly,  if  he  is  a  reasonable  man,  with 
regard  to  the  eflect  upon  his  health  and  strength  ;  and 
for  the  sake  of  restoring  his  health,  once  lost,  he  is 
glad  to  take  remedies  for  which  he  has  no  appetite, 
and  which  are  nauseous  to  the  taste.  And  the  struct- 
ure of  the  mind  requires  that  we  should  consider  the 
particular  forms  of  mental  activity  in  the  like  general 
light.  While  functions  unexercised  yield  no  pleasure, 
but  a  sense  of  discontent  more  or  less  distinct,  and 
exertion  pushed  beyond  a  certain  limit  causes  wear- 
iness or  pain,  the  mean  between  these  two  extremes, 
considered  in  relation  to  the  particular  function  which 
is  employed,  does  not  solely  and  finally  determine 
for  such  function  the  occasion  and  extent  of  its  ac- 
tivity. No  particular  function  is  a  complete  and  un- 
qualified law  unto  itself.  The  several  activities  of 
the  mind  must  be  considered  with  reference  to  the 
mind  as  an  organic  whole.  And  the  estimate,  whether 
in  terms  of  mental  or  in  terms  of  physical  life,  must 
be  made  with  reference  also  to  remote  etlects — clTects 
which  are  often  suflicient  to  outweigh  in  their  impor- 
tance to  the  individual   all    present   considerations  of 


72  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

pleasure  or  pain.  Nevertheless,  making  every  allow- 
ance for  this  added  difficulty  in  making  a  just  estimate 
of  hedonic  values,  we  cannot  find  that  life  as  a  whole, 
considered  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  individual  as 
a  dissociated  unit,  discloses  any  other  rational  prin- 
ciple for  its  own  regulation  than  the  degree  of  individ- 
ual satisfaction  or  pleasure  which  attends  its  activities 
as  a  vv'hole. 

But  as  a  matter  of  fact  the  individual  is  only  in 
very  rare  instances  dissociated,  and  the  social  nature 
of  man  makes  it  impossible  to  narrow  down  the  func- 
tions of  life,  in  society,  to  a  circle  which  excludes 
society.  Certain  impulses,  impulses  which  appear  to 
be  as  original  and  fundamental  in  our  nature  as  those 
which  are  distinguished  as  strictly  self-regarding, 
are  directed  to  the  happiness  or  well-being  of  others. 
We  cannot  be  indifferent  to  the  situation  of  those  who 
are  about  us,  and  especially  of  those  who  are  closely 
related  to  us.  Their  pleasures  and  sufferings  are,  in 
a  greater  or  less  degree,  our  own.  The  difficulty, 
already  sufficiently  great,  of  establishing  a  general 
rule  of  personal  conduct,  is  thus  indefinitely  increased 
by  the  individual's  social  instincts.  It  might  seem, 
indeed  that  the  effect  of  these  instincts  is  to  change 
the  rule;  that  in  recognizing  the  happiness  of  others 
as  an  end,  and  a  natural  end,  of  desire,  we  abandon 
the  ground  upon  which  it  is  possible  to  find  in  indi- 
vidual interest  the  governing  principle  of  individ- 
ual conduct.  The  desire  which  goes  forth  of  the  self 
cannot,  it  might  be  urged,  be  determined  by  a  prin- 
ciple which  resides  in  the  self.      But  here   again   the 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  73 

rule  is  complicated  rather  than  changed.  It  is  my 
sympathetic  or  social  interest,  an  interest  still  my 
own,  which  engages  me  in  the  interest  of  others.  A 
man  cannot  be  said,  indeed,  to  really  desire  the  hap' 
piness  of  others  unless  he  feels,  on  his  own  account, 
some  interest  or  pleasure  in  their  haj^piness;  and  a 
pure  or  disinterested  regard  is  not  a  regard  from 
which  all  personal  interest  is  expunged  (a  contradic- 
tion in  terms),  but  a  regard  which,  undisturbed  by 
calculations  of  prolit,  or  by  ulterior  non-social  mo- 
tives, is  purely  social  or  S37mpathetic.  Nay,  does 
not  the  beneficiary  find  the  sweetness  of  the  gift  in 
the  pleasure  which  the  giver  feels  in  his  giving?  And 
would  not  a  spirited  man  resent,  even  in  extremity, 
every  offer,  though  prompted  by  more  than  a  Kan- 
tian sense  of  duty,  in  which  such  pleasure  seemed 
wanting?  True,  one  does  not  incessantly  study  or 
bring  into  conscious  relief  the  egoistic  ground  of 
one's  benefactions?  The  ultimate  motive  to  genuine 
beneficent  activity,  the  sympathetic  interest  which 
makes  the  motive  mine,  and  which  most  commends 
the  benefit  to  the  beneficiary,  would  defeat  itself  did 
it  not  leave  me  free  to  study  the  tastes,  the  pleasures, 
the  welfare  of  others,  as  proximate  interests.  All 
compound  motivation  shows  a  similar  obscuration  of 
the  original  motive;  it  is  the  more  immediate  steps 
necessary  to  the  realization  of  the  linal  end  that  re- 
cpiire  our  more  immediate  attention.  And  language 
itself  misleads  us  here.  The  sympathetic  motive  be- 
ing called  an  unselfish  motive,  we  speak  of  it  as  if  it 
were  entirely  tlissociated  from  the  ends  cherished  by 


*J^  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

the  self.  But  the  entire  self  includes,  of  course,  all 
our  ends  or  interests,  all  our  motives.  The  ends 
which  are  placed  without  the  self,  and  approved  as 
unselfish,  are  not  without  the  self  in  its  entirety,  but 
merely  opposed  to  ends  which  are  identified  with  the 
self  in  a  special  and  narrower  sense,  that  is,  with  the 
self  less  the  social  and  generous  interests  which  do 
in  fact  constitute  a  part  of  the  self  as  a  whole.  The 
ego  does  not  cease  to  be  the  ego  when  it  becomes  un- 
selfish. It  is  discharging  an  essential  function,  the 
gratification,  namely,  of  the  social  impulse.  And  it 
seems  impossible  to  assign  any  principle  for  the  gov- 
ernment of  the  ego  in  the  discharge  of  either  its  so- 
cial or  its  non-social  functions  which  does  not  appeal 
to  some  interest  of  the  ego.  A  principle,  to  become 
mine,  must  have  some  basis  in  the  nature  of  my  aims. 
If  you  seek  to  engage  me  in  your  cause  by  appealing 
to  my  physical  sensibilities  or  my  fears,  you  address 
yourself  to  what  are  called  my  lower  interests.  And 
if  you  honor  me  by  assuming  my  scorn  of  such  ap- 
peals, and  seek  to  enchant  me  with  stories  of  long- 
suffering  and  martyrdom,  you  appeal  to  an  interest 
which  you  believe  to  be  stronger  than  my  longing  for 
creature-comforts  or  even  for  life,  but  an  interest 
which  is  still  my  own.  You  must  ground  yourself 
in  my  interests  somewhere.  You  must  offer  gratifi- 
cation to  some  impulse  of  my  nature. 

And  it  is  in  the  social  impulse  that  the  moral  law 
is  founded.  The  moral  aim  is  the  complete  social- 
ization of  the  race,  the  organization  of  mankind  into 
a  fraternity  in  which  man's    social    nature,   and,  in- 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  75 

deed,  man's  nature  as  a   whole,  shall    find  its    fullest 
satisfaction ;  and   the   moral   obligation,  as   an    inner 
principle  binding  a  reasonable   man  in    virtue   of  his 
constitution  as  man,  must  rest  ultimately  in  his  inter- 
est in  the  establishment  of  a  perfect  social  state.    Moral 
principles,  that  is  to   say,  derive   their   force,  in    the 
end,  from  the  individuars   interest  in    the   institution 
of  a  true  society.      And  there  seems  to  be  no  escape, 
on  natural  ground,  from  this  ultimate  reference.    We 
may  expand  the  content  of    morals   and    make   it    as 
broad  as  the  sphere    of  human  activity,  but  we   shall 
go  far  to  find  a  natural  basis  for  a  rational  law  bind- 
ing on  the  individual — and  it  is  to  the  individual  con- 
science that  the  moral  law  is  addressed — other   than 
the  interest  of  the  individual  as  determined  by  nature 
in  his  constitution    as   man;  and   the    universality  of 
such  a  law  must  be  grounded  in    a  community  of  in- 
terests among  individual  men.      Even  the  theological 
systems,  with  other  worlds  in  view,  and  with  all  the 
apparatus  of  supernaturalism    at   their  command,  ap- 
peal to  individual  interest.      But   having  an    eternity 
of  rewards  and  punishments  to   distribute,  the  center 
of  interest  is  thrown  so  far  beyond  the   limits   of  this 
our  natural    life  as  to  leave  little  motive  for  stud^'ing 
the  relation    of  morals   to   our   profoundest   interests 
under  present  and  natural  conditions.    If,  however, we 
content  ourselves  witli  merely  natural  considerations, 
it  would  seem  that  some  inherent  and  natural  interest 
in  the  law  which  we  seek  to  impose  nuist    be  shown, 
some  instinct   or  impulse    of    the    individual  must    be 
found  which  is  gratified  through  the  fullillment  of  the 


fj6  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

law,  or  the  law  remains  foreign  and  meaningless,  and 
must  borrow  sicrnificance,  like  that  which  attaches 
to  our  penal  laws,  from  an  interest  with  which  it  is 
but  artificially  or  indirectly  associated.  And  the  nat- 
ural interest  which  sustains  the  moral  law  is  prima- 
rily, we    submit,  the  social    interest. 

But  in  estimating  the  importance   of   morality  as  a 
social  obligation  we  should  bear  in  mind  that  the  ben- 
efits of  the  social  state  are  not  conhned  to   the  direct 
gratiiication  of  the  social  instincts.    Art  and  science, 
civilization    and    refinement,  well    nigh    all   that   life 
means  to  the  modern  man,  were   impossible   but   for 
the  opportunities  which    society    alone,  society,    that 
is,  orcranized  and  cohering  as  a  moral    life,  can  offer 
for  the  play  of  individual  genius.    As  the   individual, 
therefore,  is  interested  in  his  own  development,  he  is 
interested  in  the  establishment  of  sound  social  habits, 
and  especially  in  the    fulfillment  of  the  moral  demand 
whicli  embodies  the  requirements  of  elementary  social 
law.    Ila  ma}^  not  be  alive  to  this  his  true  interest,  or 
in  the  disorder  of  his  habits  he  may  wilfully  disregard 
it;  but  the  conditions  of  his  happiness  lie  deep  in  his 
nature,  and  are  independent  of  his  recognition  or  pres- 
ent inclination.    Nature  herself  has  bound  up  his  well- 
being  in  the  establishment  of  a  true  social  state,  which 
coheres  and  continues  only  by  the  force  of  the  moral 
tie.    Hence  the  peculiar  force  of  the  moral  obligation. 
In  the  moral  judgment  it   is  society    itself,  prompted 
by   the    insinct    of   self-preservation,    which    speaks 
through  the  individual,  and  reinforces  the  individual 
judgment  by  the  whole  energy  of  its  struggle  to  main- 


NATURE    AXD    DEITY  77 

tain  the  conditions  of  social  life.    It  may  seem  perhaps 
that  at  times  a  r!(£orous  observation  of  the  canons  of 
morality  lacks  justification  in  the  individual   account 
of  pleasures  and  pains.    The   fault,  possibly,  may  lie 
in  our  formulas.   The  phenomena  of  life  depend  upon 
conditions  so  complex  and  variable  that  our  attempts 
to  reduce  these  conditions  to  a  law  must  often   result 
in  mere  approximations;   and  when  we  consider  that 
our  formulations  of  the  moral  law  are  applied  to  men 
in  all  situations,  and  in  all  phases  of  development,  it 
is  conceivable  that  the  law,  as  we    formulate  it,  may 
hot  have  the  same  justitication  for  all  absolutely  in  its 
direct  operation  upon  the  individual  life.    l)Lit  since  a 
true  society,  which  is  a  voluntary  cooperation   of  in- 
dependent minds,  is  necessarily  founded  in  morality, 
(a  true  morality  being  but  a  voluntary  compliance  with 
the  elementary  conditions  of  the  social  state), the  jus- 
tification of  the  law  is  to  be  sought,  not   in  the  direct 
and  apparent  results  of  each  virtuous   act,  but   in  the 
advantages  accruing  to  the  individual  from  the  social 
union  as  a  whole.    It  is  possible  that  the  general  wel- 
fare may  sometimes  demand  unconditional  and  appar- 
ently uncompensated  sacrifice  on  the  jiart  of  a  few.  We 
know  that  even  the  soundest  le<£islation    works   hard- 
shij")  in  exceptional  cases.    Hut  the  advantages  of  good 
legislation,  in  spite  of  its  imperfections,  remain  to  the 
individual,  as  it  atTects    him  generally,  incalculable; 
and  [he  advantages  nf  moral    or    primarv    social    law 
are  f.o  much  the    more    incontestable    as    compliance 
with  its  demands  is  the  indispensable  condition  of  the 
social  uriion  itself,  so  far  as  it  is  really  social,  and  of 


78  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

all  that  man,  whose  dread  of  isolation  is  hardlj^  less 
than  his  dread  of  death,  can  hope  to  gain  or  enjoy 
in  the  society  of  his  kind.  And  with  this  general  con- 
sideration, which  is  sufficient  to  establish  the  general 
validity  of  the  moral  law,  we  must  here  be  content. 
The  discussion  of  particular  or  exceptional  cases,  as 
also  of  the  theory  of  punishment  and  the  question  of 
responsibility,  belongs  to  a  special  treatise  on  ethics. 

We  must  leave  to  the  ethical  student,  too,  the  task 
of  deducing  and  systematizing  the  provisions  of  eth- 
ical law,  noting  only  our  conviction  that  the  princi- 
ples of  morality,  as  disclosed  in  the  long  experience 
of  the  race  and  as  commonl}^  formulated  among  civi- 
lized nations,  may  be  taken  as  true  enough  in  the 
main  to  stand  for  the  natural  law.  The  right  remains, 
of  course,  to  search  for  completer  formulae,  to  deter- 
mine with  more  precision  the  application  of  each  par- 
ticular rule.  But  meantime  we  may  agree  that  the 
ordinary  statement  of  the  law  is  at  least  an  approxi- 
mate statement.  Practically,  it  may  be  taken  for 
nature's  law,  the  natural  and  indispensable  condition, 
that  is,  of  the  establishment  of  a  true  social  state. 

The  end  directly  contemplated  in  the  moral  law, 
however,  namely,  the  establishment  of  a  perfect  so- 
cial union,  is,  as  we  have  seen,  but  a  means  to  the 
attainment  of  an  ulterior  and  a  broader  end.  Ulti- 
mately, we  contend,  the  moral  end  and  all  discipli- 
nary ends  are  merged  in  one  general  end,  the 
attainment  of  a  happier  estate.  Happiness,  it  is  true, 
is  a  comprehensive  word  which  includes,  in  gross,  the 
attainment  of   man}^   different    ends,  and  is  therefore 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  79 

open  to  different  interpretations  as  taste  or  inclination 
varies,  or  as  our  skill  in  the  estimate  of  hedonic  val- 
ues is  less  or  greater;  but  as  it  is  idle  to  affect  in  our 
language  a  rigor  which  the  facts  will  not  warrant, 
or  a  precision  which  is  wanting  in  our  knowledge, 
we  content  ourselves  with  a  term  which  is  fairl}^  in- 
telligible, and  which  experience  and  reflection  tend 
to  define  with  increasing  certainty.  We  put  the  term 
happiness,  therefore,  to  represent  the  ideal  or  perfect 
satisfaction  of  man's  nature  as  a  whole  in  life  as  a 
whole,  or  such  approximation  to  this  ideal  estate  as 
the  circumstances  of  life  make  possible.  We  allow  a 
certain  indefiniteness  in  the  term.  We  admit,  further, 
that  constitutions  differ,  and  that  to  the  extent  of  this 
difference  the  ends  of  life,  as  also  the  means  for  the 
attainment  of  such  ends,  must  differ.  But  so  far  as 
morality  is  concerned  such  differences  are  relatively 
unimportant.  Morality  is  founded  in  certain  com- 
mon characters  and  common  interests  of  humanity. 
It  is,  as  we  have  said,  elementary.  All  are  interested 
in  strengthening  and  perfecting  the  social  union,  not 
only  as  a  means  of  gratifying  the  social  impulse,  but 
as  a  condition  absolutely  indispensal^le  to  the  general 
development  of  our  nature,  and  to  the  ampler,  keener, 
and  more  varied  satisfaction  which  attends  the  activ- 
ity of  energies  more  fully  and  more  harmoniously 
developed,  a  development  which,  as  we  have  seen, 
is  impossible  except  in  the  social  union.  And  the 
essential  law  of  this  union  is  the  moral  law.  Moral- 
ity (U'fines  the  form  of  tlu'  elementary  social  ri'la- 
tions,    antl    the    c][ualilications    of  the    individual    will 


8o  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

pre -requisite  to  the  formation  of  such  relations.  Truth, 
honesty,  justice,  love — so  far  as  a  man  is  destitute  of 
these,  the  elements  of  the  moral  character,  he  is  dis- 
qualified for  the  social  life.  Morality  is  capable,  there- 
fore,interpreted  as  a  means  to  happiness, of  something 
like  definiteness  of  treatment  and  universality  of 
application.  Though  we  may  allow  that  life  is  too 
complex  and  that  men  are  too  unlike  to  admit  of  the 
reduction  of  the  conduct  of  life  generally,  as  a  pur- 
suit of  happiness,  to  definite  prescriptions  valid  for 
all,  yet  if  any  science  of  conduct  is  possible,  if  there 
is  anything  whatever  in  the  ends  pursued  by  human- 
ity which  is  common  to  the  species,  the  elementary 
principles  of  such  a  science  ought  to  be  susceptible 
of  some  precision  of  statement.  And  among  such 
elementary  principles,  we  maintain,  must  be  included 
the  principles  of  morality. 

The  moral  law,  therefore,  lying  at  the  basis  of 
politics  and  jurisprudence — (ethics  was  fused  with 
politics  in  the  philosophies  of  Plato  and  Aristotle) — 
and  of  all  the  more  specific  requirements  of  the  social 
union,  may  be  regarded  as  a  main  condition  of  the 
attainment  of  ideal  happiness,  and  of  the  ideal  life  in 
which  alone  such  happiness  is  possible.  In  other 
words,  virtue  is  a  means — an  indispensable  means — 
to  such  happiness  as  man  may  hope  for  through  a  life 
in  union  with  his  fellowmen.  The  moral  quality  of 
an  act,  accordingly,  is  not  an  ultimate,  irresoluble 
fact.  It  is  a  means  to  an  end.  And  it  may  be  dis- 
cussed and  determined  as  we  discuss  and  determine 
the  reasonableness  of  the  means  to  any  end,  that  is  to 


NATURE    AND    DJCITY  8 1 


say,  in  the  ligbt  of  the  fitness  of  the  means  to  promote 
the  realization  of  the  end.  The  end  here,  proxi- 
mately the  solidification  of  human  society,  is  ulti- 
mately, the  promotion  of  human  happiness,  that  is, 
the  hcippiness  of  the  units  which  constitute  humanity, 
since  it  is  only  through  the  individual  consciousness 
that  society  is  conscious  of  happiness  or  unhappiness 
at  all.  Moral  determinations,  therefore,  and  all  dis- 
tinctions urged  as  valid  in  morals,  may  be  analyzed 
and  weiifhed  with  reference  to  the  end  to  be  attained 
by  the  moral  life,  and  are  to  be  approved  or  con- 
demned, not  absolutely,  or  as  ultimate  facts  of  con- 
sciousness, but  according  to  their  relation  to  this  end. 
And  such  determinations  have  become,  to  a  certain 
extent,  habitual  or  instinctive.  The  conscious  rea- 
soning process  has  been  abridged  or  eliminated.  But 
they  do  not  for  that  reason  occupy  a  position  which 
takes  them  out  of  the  ordinary  course  of  the  develop- 
ment of  the  mind.  The}'  are  particular  cases  of  a 
general  law,  a  law  which,  so  far  as  men  are  reason- 
able, governs  their  choice  in  the  general  relations  of 
life,  including  those  which  are  commonly  considered 
extra  moral. 


VII. 

Mon  voeu  le  plus  cher  serait d'entretenir     en  vous le 

culte  des  belles  connaissances,  ce  gout  des  choses  de  I'esprit  sans 
lequel  I.homme  civilise  n'atteint  jamais  a  toute  la  noblesse  de  sa  des- 
tinee  ni  a  tout  le  fini  de  sa  nature. — Sainte-Beuve. 

And  he  answering  said,  Thou  shalt  love  the  Lord  thy  God  with 
all  thy  heart,  and  with  all  thy  soul,  and  with  all  thy  strength,  and 
with  all  thy  mind;  and  thy  neighbor  as  thyself. — Luke  X,2j. 

It  appears,  then,  that  the  moral  law  is  a  natural 
law.  Man  being  by  nature  what  he  is,  and  the  laws 
of  his  growth  being  such  as  they  are  in  nature  estab- 
lished, the  morallaw  prescribes  certain  natural  means 
indispensable  to  the  attainment  of  the  end  which  ap- 
pears, upon  due  consideration  of  man's  nature,  to  be 
in  reason  supreme.  And  this  sequence  of  means  and 
end  is  the  sequence  of  cause  and  effect.  In  so  far  as 
we  follow  the  end  which  is  by  the  form  of  our  con- 
stitution man's  supreme  or  rational  end,  we  must,  in 
the  nature  of  things,  shape  our  lives  in  harmony  with 
the  moral  law  as  defining  an  essential  part  of  the 
means.  We  may  ignore  the  moral  demand.  But  to 
ignore  the  moral  demand  is,  so  far,  to  abandon  the 
end  toward  which  we  advance  by  the  moral  life. 
Means  and  ends  are  causally  conjoined. 

And  it  were  hard  to  overstate  the  importance  to 
mankind  of  a  general  and  settled  moral  habit.  The 
social  union  is  a  moral  union.     The  struggle  for  the 

82 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  83 

supremacy  of  the  social  instincts  is  man's  great  moral 
struggle.  And  as  all  the  gains  of  civilization  depend 
upon  social  or  cooperative  action,  man's  progress  in 
tlie  development  of  his  being  or  in  the  realization  of 
life's  essential  ends,  begins  in  morality.  The  moral- 
ist's persistent  assertion  of  the  urgency  of  his  message 
is  justili''d  by  the  facts  of  our  nature. 

But  life  can  yield   its   maximum    satisfaction    only 
through  such  development  of  our  functions  generally 
as  is  consistent  with  their    completest  efliciency  as   a 
Vv'hole;    and   the   discharge   of   the   social    functions 
proper,  especially  when  these  are   further  limited   to 
such  elementary  acts,  aptitudes,  or  tendencies  as  com- 
monly occupy  the  attention  of  the    moralist,  engages 
but  a  portion  of  our  total  conscious  activity.    In  other 
words,  the  moral    law,  broad  as  is   its  application,  is 
not  the  whole  law  of  conscious  life.   There  are  forms 
of  our  activit}' — intellectual,  artistic,  creative,  for  in- 
stance— which  demand  a  special  discipline,  for  which 
moralit}^  at  least  as  ordinarily  interpreted,  makes  no 
provision,  and    of  wliich  it  hardly  takes  cognizance. 
Tlie  moral     demand,    sliaped    bv    experience   to   our 
practit:al  needs,  is  restricted  to  the  fundamental    and 
more  obvious  necessities  of  social  life.     And  havintr, 
moreover,  in  the  form  in    which  we   actually  lind  it, 
a  strong  traditional    element,  to  which  it  owes  much 
of  its  force  in  the  control  of  conduct,  it  is  not  wliolly 
free  from  the  vice  of  tradition,  that    is    to    sav,    from 
the   tendency     to    l)ecome     unicasoning,    hard,    and 
formal,    wliich    marks    the    arrested    development    of 
thought.      But  were  it  as  vital  ami  rxpansive  as  a  ra- 


84  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

tional  apprehension  of  its  aim  should  make  it,  much 
that  concerns  the  government  of  life  as  a  whole 
would  lie  without  its  distinctive  sphere.  True,  one 
may  scarce  name  a  phase  of  life  that  has  not  its  so- 
cial bearing;  and  possibl}',  with  a  little  ingenuity, 
one  might  cast  every  principle  of  life  into  ethical 
form.  The  ethical  ideal  would  then  stand  for  the 
full  ideal,  and  govern  the  whole  sphere  of  life,  leav- 
ing no  room  for  religion,  as  a  praxis,  except  as  iden- 
tified with  ethics.  But  such  an  expansion  of  the 
content  of  ethics,  though  of  present  service  perhaps 
in  correcting  the  obstinacy  with  which  popular  relig- 
ion cherishes  certain  cosmic  and  theologic  hypotheses 
to  which  it  is  committed,  must  tend  to  obscure  the 
fundamental  importance  of  ethical  distinctions,  and 
therefore  to  weaken  the  real  strength  of  the  moral 
demand.  ■  Nature  indeed  knows  no  absolute  line. 
Each  element  of  life  is  organically  united  with  all 
the  elements  that  enter  into  the  vital  union.  But  this 
underlying  unity  does  not  justify  us  in  ignoring  all 
distinctions  in  the  point  of  view,  or  m  refusing  sepa- 
rate treatment  to  clearly  separable  fields;  and  inas- 
much as  the  moral  laws,  slowly  learned  in  the  pain 
of  experience,  have  acquired  in  the  thoughts  and  in- 
stincts of  the  race  a  fairly  distinctive  form,  this 
general  form  it  seems  best,  if  only  on  practical 
grounds,  to  retain. 

And  the  practical  distinction  is  philosophically 
justifiable.  A  single  broad  principle,  as  we  have 
said,  comprehends  in  the  main  all  that  is  ordinarily  in- 
cluded in  the  moral  demand.   Morality  interpreted  as 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  85 

the  primar}^  or  elementary  law  of  social  life  is  prac- 
tically coextensive  with  the  scope  of  the  judgments 
commonly  recognized  as  moral.  From  the  empirical 
character  of  such  judgments,  as  they  arise  in  the  com- 
mon consciousness,  we  may  well  understand  how  the 
line  of  demarcation  corresponding  to  this  underlying 
principle  should  at  times  be  overstepped,  but  it  will 
be  found  upon  analysis,  we  submit,  that  where 
morality  is  emancipated  from  the  arbitrary  require- 
ments imposed  b}^  mere  custom,  ancestral  or  relig- 
ious, the  moral  laws  may  be  readily  reduced  to  the 
fundamental  conditions  of  social  union.  And  as 
these  general  conditions  are  precisely  the  conditions 
which  would  naturally  be  recognized,  not  indeed  by 
every  barbarous  tribe,  but  b}'  all  the  races  of  men 
who  have  addressed  themselves  with  any  considerable 
success  to  the  problems  of  social  organization,  we 
see  how  it  is  tliat  morality,  defined  as  the  fundamental 
social  law,  should  assume  a  form  which,  with  some 
natural  dilTerences,  is  practically  the  same  in  all  de- 
veloped communities.  A  tract  of  conduct  so  consist- 
ently distinguished,  in  practice,  and  so  easily  covered, 
as  thus  distinguished  by  a  common  principle,  it  were 
best  thoiefore  to  reserve  as  the  proper  domain  of  this 
princijile  when  we  attempt  to  reduce  our  emj")irical 
judjrments  to  scientific  form.  1  Icnce  we  have  marked 
olT  the  field  of  morals  as  a  part  only  of  the  general 
field  01'  conduct.  Morality  goes  to  the  character  of 
the  individual,  not  in  his  many-sided  and  (general 
capacity  as  man,  b  il  in  his  ijuality,  distinctively,  as 
a  member  of  the  human  fraternity;  and  it   is   further 


86  NATURE   AND    DEITY 

distinguished  from  social  law  in  general  by  the  fun- 
damental character  of  its  requirements.  It  is  to  the 
general  body  of  social  law  what  the  constitutional  law 
of  the  state  is  to  the  great  body  of  its  subordinate  leg- 
islation; it  is  the  organic  law  of  social  life.  Indi- 
rectly it  has,  of  course,  a  bearing  upon  all  our 
conduct,  social  and  non-social,  seeing  that  there  is 
no  phase  of  the  activity  of  a  vital  organism  but  is 
conditioned  by,  and  in  turn  reacts  upon,  the  activity 
of  the  organism  as  a  whole.  But,  for  the  reasons  as- 
signed,  it  seems  better  to  restrict  the  immediate 
subject-matter  of  morals  to  the  attitude  and  general 
disposition  of  the  individual  unit  toward  other  such 
units  in  the  organic  unity  of  society.  And  the  moral 
principle,  thus  restricted  or  defined,  will  expand,  so 
far  as  it  needs  expansion,  by  the  natural  laws  of 
growth.  As  the  feebler  moral  impulses  settle  firmly 
into  instincts,  that  is,  as  our  actual  moral  state  im- 
proves, the  moral  demand,  which  in  its  application  to 
our  actual  conduct  cannot  ignore  the  limits  of  what 
is  practicable,  will  become  upon  is  own  proper  ground 
more  searching  and  comprehensive.  And  the  essen- 
tials of  conduct  will  cover,  no  doubt,  a  progressively 
wider  area  of  conduct. 

But  if  morality,  as  here  accepted  and  as  commonly 
understood,  occupies  only  a  part  of  the  field  of  con- 
duct, moral  discipline  must  be  supplemented  by  a 
broader  culture.  The  moral  law  should  be  appre- 
hended in  the  light  of  some  principle  or  idea  which  em- 
braces the  possibilities  of  luiman  life  as  a  whole.  And 
for  such  an  idea  we  must  turn  to  religion,  as  conceived 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  87 

by  its  profoundest  teachers,  and  developed  in  the 
direction  of  its  soundest  growth.  True,  there  is  hardly 
a  notable  error  but  has  been  consecrated  b}'  asso- 
ciation with  religion.  So,  also,  one  could  scarce  name 
a  crime  against  humanity  that  has  not  been  commit- 
ted in  the  name  of  the  state.  But  tlje  religious  idea 
and  the  idea  of  the  state,  though  sadly  distorted  by 
ignorance  and  passion,  are  both,  apparently,  indis- 
pensable, and  are  both  capable  of  purification  and 
expansion.  And  the  fact  that  religion  assumes  to 
comprehend  the  total  activity  of  human  life,  and  has 
shown  itself  susceptible  of  adaptation  to  the  thought 
of  any  age,  would  suggest,  it  would  seem,  to  a  mind 
impressed  with  the  evolutionist  tendencies  of  the 
time,  that  in  our  need  for  a  discipline  and  an  ideal 
which  shall  be  as  broad  as  our  human  endowment,  we 
should  make  use,  as  far  as  possible,  of  the  accumu- 
lated strength  of  religious  habit,  rather  than  under- 
take the  establishment  of  a  new  discipline  or  cultus 
in  more  or  less  conscious  anta££onism  with  that  which 
has  been  instituted  under  relitrious  sanctions  and  un- 
der  the  inlluence  of  religious  ideals.  In  fact,  the 
distiiictlv  idealizin({  tendencies  of  rcli^^ion  seem  to 
mark  it  as  the  necessary  counterpoise  to  man's  dis- 
content with  the  bare  actuality,  and  an  indispens  il'le 
means  of  correcting  the  grosser  elTects  in  the  mind 
of  the  struggle  for  existence  under  the  actual  contli- 
tions  of  life.  The  religious  ima<{ination  has  doubt- 
less  run  wild.  It  is  the  tendency  of  every  strong 
imjnilse  to  run  wild.  Jiut  without  imagination,  with- 
out ideals  which  are  the  creation  of  the  imaiiination, 


88  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

the  hope  of  rescuing  humanity  from  its  animalism 
and  selfishness  is  slight,  and  we  must  trust  to  the  in- 
crease of  knowledge  to  discipline  the  imagination  — 
not  to  weaken  it;  to  strengthen  it,  rather,  by  teaching 
it  to  walk,  as  Shakespeare  and  Raphael  walked,  on 
the  ground  of  reality;  by  directing  it  to  the  facts  as 
the  fittest  matter  for  its  creative  or  shaping  hand. 
And  there  is  in  religion,  however  we  may  condemn 
its  irrational  elements,  an  ideal  of  human  perfection, 
whether  conceived  as  embodied  in  human  life  or  as 
exemplified  in  an  expanded  form  in  the  divine  exist- 
ence, which  has  been  of  incalculable  service  to 
humanity,  and  which  is  so  far  broader  than  the  moral 
ideal  that  it  needs  but  easy  modification  to  suppl}^  the 
want  of  which  our  study  of  morals  has  left  us  con- 
scious. Heart,  soul,  strength,  mind,  every  instru- 
mentalitj'  and  every  power,  are  constrained  to  the 
service  of  this  ideal.  Man  is  conceived  as  in  his  whole 
being  responsible  to  an  ideal  being;  and  we  have 
only  to  develop  this  conception  by  a  completer  recog- 
nition of  the  richness  of  human  capacit}',  and  by  a 
juster  appreciation  of  the  meaning  of  the  ideal  and  of 
its  relation  to  the  actual,  to  fit  the  conception  for  every 
purpose  which  we  may  hope  to  accomplish  b}^  means 
of  an  idea  as  comprehensive  as  the  scope  of  human 
activity  and  aims. 

Contrasting  religion,  then,  conceived  in  this  de- 
veloped sense,  with  moralitj^  we  find  that  it  compre- 
hends moralit}'.  In  its  practical  aspect,  that  is,  as 
furnishing  a  guide  for  conduct,  it  is  distinguished 
from  morality  by  its  greater  breadth,  or  as  the  whole 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  89 

may  be  distinguished  from  its  part,  since  it  takes  cog- 
nizance of  all  the   means  to   life's   general  end,    and 
commands  the  devotion  of  heart,  mind,  soul,  strength, 
to  the   realization    of   the   fuller   ideal    in    which   the 
moral  ideal  is  merged.      It  comprehends  all  duty,  all 
aspiration ;  hopes   for   all    happiness.      The   faith    of 
many  ages,  shaped  by  the  dream    of  a  fairer   life,  to 
which  we  feel  instinctivel}^  that  this  actual  life   must 
tend,  has  laid    the  scene  of  its  consummated  hope  in 
a  "world  beyond,"  created  under  gentler  conditions 
than  our    care-laden  earth,  and    lying  nearer   to   the 
hand  of  that  providence  which  dela3'S,  it  would  seem, 
to  soften  the  harshness  of  natural  conditions  and  stay 
the  injustice  of   our  fellowmen.      But    the  naturalist 
does  not  so  despair  of   nature.      For  him  the  ideal  is 
the  development  of  the   actual.      He   looks   forward, 
not  to  translation  to  other  worlds,  but  to  the  transfor- 
mation of  the  existing  world,  building  his  hope  upon 
the  reformation    of  the    will,  completer   organization 
or  fraternity,   the   unfolding   of  powers  yet   latent  or 
feeble,  and  the  slow  amelioration  of  the  external  con- 
ditions of  life.      But  wherever  the  world  of  our  long- 
ing, it  is  man  in  his  ideal  estate  which  inspires  man's 
finest  thought    and  touches  his  spirit  to  finest   issues; 
and    it    is   the     impulsion     toward    this    ideal    world, 
wherever  in  imagination  it  is  figured    as    real,  which 
characterizes     the    religious    life.       R».'ligi()n    is    the 
cfTort  of  our  nature  to  perfect  itsolf  as  a  wliole.      It  is 
the  total  imjiulse  of   the  rational    life    shaping  all  the 
means  of  life  to  life's  supreme  enil;   tlie    resultant    of 
all  vital  tendencies  seeking  each  its  fullest  realization 


90  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

as  a  constituent  force  in  the  action  of  the  soul  as  an 
organic  whole.  Religion,  in  a  word,  is,  in  its  best 
and  ultimate  sense,  the  general  principle  of  life  as- 
serting itself  in  its  completest  and  most  effective  form. 
And  morality  is  so  far  from  exhausting  the  contents 
of  religion,  that  the  moral  regeneration  of  our  nature 
is,  in  a  sense,  but  a  preparation  for  the  realization  of 
the  religious  ideal.  The  education  and  discipline  of 
our  powers,  the  enlargement  of  our  interests,  and  all 
the  finer  effects  of  human  energy,  are  possible  only 
in  the  medium  of  a  socialized  community,  in  a  com- 
munity, that  is,  which  has  acquired  a  certain  soli- 
darity through  the  strength  of  moral  ties.  Where  these 
ties  are  wantinor  there  can  be  no  social  state;  and 
where  these  ties  are  relaxed  there  we  may  see  already 
the  beginnings  of  a  social  and  general  decline.  It  is 
indeed  a  commonplace  of  history  that  vice,  which  is 
the  corruption  of  the  social  bond,  brutalizes  the  mind, 
and  tends  necessarily,  as  it  debases  the  feelings,  to 
the  extinction  of  art,  science,  philosophy,  and  all  the 
higher  forms  of  the  intellectual  life.  The  function  of 
morality,  however,  is  not  merely  preparatory  or  an- 
cillary to  the  general  discipline  of  the  spirit  which  is 
the  function  of  religion.  Society  is  more  than  a  means 
to  ulterior  ends;  the  social  impulse  is  an  integral  part 
of  our  nature.  The  feeling  which  holds  us  to  our 
kind,  and  makes  the  human  face,  marred  as  it  is  by 
relics  of  our  original  wildness,  the  dearest  sight  that 
can  satisfy  our  eyes,  is  a  jo}^  in  itself,  an  end  in  itself. 
Love,  the  fulfillment  of  the  law,  is  its  own  sufficient 
reason.      Life,  nevertheless,  is  more  than   the  fulfill' 


NATURE    AYD    DEITY  9 1 

ment  of  the  social  law.  It  is  conceivable,  indeed, 
that  every  barbaric  impulse  were  softened,  and  the 
last  ugly  residue  of  the  struggle  for  existence  were 
refined  from  our  manners,  leaving  our  lives  notwith- 
standing insipid  and  barren.  But  in  truth  love  itself 
is  not  mere  love.  It  is  companionship  in  life's  occu- 
pations: presupposes,  as  its  ground  and  opportunity, 
interests  and  occupations  which  companionship  shall 
make  more  gracious.  And  the  soul  grows  morbid 
when  not  well  occupied.  Atrophy  wastes  its  sub- 
stance, and  a  chafing,  inarticulate  discontent  eats  up 
the  zest  of  life.  Hence  the  emptiness  of  our  ordinary 
ambitions.  The  soul  is  but  in  part  alive;  its  fine  ap- 
titudes are  ignored,  and  the  taint  of  insufficiency  in- 
fects the  natural  sweetness  of  life. 

"We  look  before  and  after, 
And  pine  for  what  is  not; 
And  our  sincerest  laughter 
With  some  pain  is  fraught." 

Power  undeveloped,  life  denied,  cankers  the  life 
which  finds  expression ;  and  man,  born  to  the  free- 
dom of  nature,  ''so  noble  in  reason,  so  infinite  in 
faculties,"  drags  himself  hopelessly  in  a  dull  round 
of  habit,  making  of  the  means  of  life  its  end,  and 
shutting  out  the  liope  and  illumination  of  those  gen- 
erous aims  which  broaden  the  intention  of  life,  anil 
which  alone  bi'ing  life  to  its  full  fruition. 

To  correct  this  morbid  condition,  and  to  grasp  and 
keep  before  tin*  mint!  the  functions  of  life  as  an  or- 
ganic wholf,  V  liich  f-ilTei?  as  a  whole  whrii  it  is 
niaiinvtl  or  disonh-r^  ti  in    any    part,  is    the    ollit:e    of 


92  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

religion,  we  conceive,  as  distinguished  from  morals 
or  the  discipline  of  any  social  function.  The  total 
end  of  life  is  attainable  only  through  the  discharge 
of  the  general  offices  of  life,  each  in  its  place  and 
degree,  as  measured  by  the  general  result;  and  re- 
ligion, which  owes  its  inspirational  power  to  its  lofti- 
ness and  breadth  of  view,  relieves  by  its  freedom  the 
constriction  of  each  special  pursuit,  and  tends  espec- 
ially to  check  the  degradation  or  necrosis  of  the  finer 
energies  which  results  from  absorption  in  material- 
istic aims.  It  blows  over  our  faces  the  air  of  those 
Delectable  Mountains  which  haunt  the  vision  of  every 
idealist.  It  will  liberalize  the  ethical  aim  itself, 
which  commonly  unites  with  a  kind  of  translocated 
materialism,  or  longing  for  celestial  luxuries,  which 
calls  itself  religion,  in  diverting  to  petty  issues  the 
little  thought  that  we  spare  for  the  general  conduct  of 
life.  Idealizing  the  form  of  our  humanity,  religion 
ignores  no  element  of  manhood.  The  caieful  pains, 
the  late-learned  skill,  with  which  we  spell  out  the 
letters  of  nature's  imperishable  laws ;  the  sense  im- 
pressible to  beauty,  and  the  plastic  hand  which  re- 
casts all  natural  forms  in  art's  original  molds;  the 
brooding  thought  which  enters,  impatient  of  the  too 
obvious  sense,  among  the  mysteries  and  shadows  of 
being  and  lingers  about  the  portals  of  the  infinite; 
have  all,  as  elements  of  that  fuller  manhood  whiiih  is 
at  once  the  despair  and  the  hope  of  each  generous 
spirit,  a  religious  worth.  And  in  that  fairer  manhood 
are  attributes  which  the  more  pretentious  gifts  ob- 
scure.  The  patience  of  Vv'eakness,  the  heart  that  bears 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  93 

up  under  defeat;  na}^  the  laborer's  strength,  the 
runner's  swiftness,  the  workman!s  craft,  ranks  each 
in  its  degree  as  a  fit  expression  of  the  energizing 
soul.  Life  is  the  sum  of  all  its  qualities.  And  relig- 
ion, as  the  cultus  of  the  general  ideal,  cherishes  each 
in  its  peculiar  excellence,  and  cherishes  all. 

On  practical   grounds,    however,  it    may   well    be 
found  that  morality  must  long  furnish    the  main  text 
of  our  religious  teachings.      The   gravity  of   the    in- 
terests which  depends  upon  the  strength  of  the  moral 
tie,  and  the  relative  feebleness  of  the  moral   instincts 
in  a  large  pait  of  mankind,  appear  to  justify  the   re- 
striction of  religious   eHort  mainly    to   the    reinforce- 
m-Mit  of  these  instincts.    But  we  cannot   overlook  the 
fact  that  morality  itself  must  sulTer  where  the  general 
development  is   retarded.      Rude   sensibilities    imply 
dull  S3  mpathies.    Ignorance  and  a  blunt  intelligence, 
even  where  the  conscience  is  alive,  miss   all    but   the 
more  obvious  of  moral   distinctions;  and    in  commu- 
nities where  there  is  a   pervading   dullness  of   moral 
perception  even  the  more  sensitive  will  feel  the  elTect 
of  the  general  obduration.      Every  man's  conscience 
is  influenced  by  the  standards    of  the   men    amongst 
whom  he  moves.      And  the    moral    sense   shares   the 
bias  and  dispro]-)()rti()n    of  the  mind.      The    religious 
partisan  who  would  shrink  from  a   conscious  lie  cir- 
culates without  scrutiny  slandtM*  of  a    Romanist    or  a 
freethinker,  and   political    immorality  is   rife   among 
men  who  in  private   relations    pass  for   men    of  their 
word  and  honest.      Hence,  as  th(^  wise   phvsicinn  at- 
tacks the  diseases  of  the  botly  not    idways   with    spe- 


94  NATURE  AND  DEITY 

cifics,  but  oftener  perhaps  by  raising  the  general 
tone,  so  the  thoughtful  moralist,  knowing  that  the 
conscience  cannot  be  wiser  than  the  reason  which 
guides  it,  or  tenderer  than  the  feeling  which  quickens 
it,  will  broaden  the  basis  of  his  work,  and  rely  even 
more  upon  the  elevation  of  the  mental  tone  than  upon 
direct  moral  teaching.  As  mere  moralist  he  must 
study  more  than  his  science.  The  very  depth  and 
pervasiveness  of  the  moral  interest  require  that  he 
shall  conceive  of  his  ethical  doctrine  as  but  a  chapter 
in  the  general  doctrine  and  discipline  of  the  soul. 
Without  the  inspiration  of  religion's  broader  aims  he 
is  a  docrmatist  or  a  martinet.  Mere  rules  or  dicta  in- 
flame  no  zeal;  it  is  the  beauty  of  the  full  ideal  which 
touches  the  imagination  and  kindles  the  ardors  of  a 
sacred  passion.  Ethics  must  borrow  its  heat  from 
religion. 

Religion,  in  fine,  as  here  conceived,  regards  the 
capacities  and  possibilities  of  life  in  their  harmony  and 
entirety.  Recognizing  in  ethics  the  same  general 
principle  which  in  reason  should  govern  the  conduct  of 
life,  it  insists  upon  the  general  principle  as  against 
the  particular  rule,  or  rather  as  the  source  and  justifi- 
cation of  all  that  is  sound  in  our  rules.  This  general 
principle  is  the  law  of  human  happiness,  the  natural 
law  which  prescribes  the  immutable  conditions  of 
human  well-being.  Religion  apprehends  in  this  law 
the  fiat  of  omnipotence.  Shifting  our  regar^^  from 
immediate  to  remoter  ends,  from  the  meaner  interests 
of  life  to  its  broader  intention,  it  traces  the  scheme 
and  purport  of  our  lives  to  universal  laws,  and  grounds 


NATURE  AND  DEITY  95 

our  frail  being  in  the  infinite.  It  is,  in  a  word,  reason 
in  its  highest  exercise,  feeling  on  its  highest  plane. 
Comprehending  life  in  its  total  scope,  it  spurns  the 
suggestions  of  an  errant  inclination,  and  winning  us 
to  the  contemplation  of  great  ideals  stirs  in  us  a  zeal 
to  seek  for  our  particular  lives,  meager  as  may  be 
their  gifts,  the  most  perfect  expression.  And  human 
nature,  den^nng  the  religious  law,  denies  itself,  for 
in  the  end  it  is  the  vital  principle  itself  which  deter- 
mines the  form  of  the  law. 


VIII. 

11  y  a  au  sein  de  1'  humanite  une  source  de  chaleur  qui  n'est  pas 
pres  de  s'eteindre,  et,  quand  meme  il  serait   proave  que  Thumanite 
comme  le  soleil  se    refroidera  un  jour,  il  y    a  quelque  chose  qui    ne 
meurt  pas,  c'est  I'ideal, — Renan. 

In  reducing  religion,  as  a  law  of  conduc!-,  to  the 
law  of  the  complete  or  ideal  development  of  life  we 
arrive  at  a  principle  which  furnishes  the  key  to  the 
solution  of  our  main  problem  in  each  of  its  aspects. 

We  started  our  inquiry  assuming  as  the  underlying 
thouorht  in  religion  that  there  resides  in  nature,  or  is 
manifest  through  nature,  an  overruling  power.  And 
to  propitiate,  or  in  some  way  harmonize  our  relations 
with,  this  power  we  assumed  to  be  religion's  underly- 
ing aim.  So  much  we  took  for  granted.  Our  task 
then  was  two-fold ;  first,  to  interpret  this  power  as 
apprehended  in  the  religious  sense;  secondly,  to 
frame  a  theor}^  of  life  in  harmony  with  its  action. 

We  took  the  ground    at   the  outset,    also,  that   our 

knowledge  of  such  supreme  power,  interpreted   here 

as  natural  power,  must  be  based  upon  a  stud}^  of  the 

order  and  content  of  nature.    We  postulated,  in  fact, 

that  nature  is  identical  with  universal  being.      But  as 

being  in  general  includes   both    man  and    the   object 

of  his  worship — includes,  indeed,  all   objects  and  all 

determinations  whatever — it  was  necessary  to  search 

for  a  principle  in  the  light  of  which  we  might   inter- 

96 


NATURE  AND  DEITY  97 

pret  nature  universal  in  a  sense  specifically  religious; 
or  define,  in  other  words,  the  religious  aspect  of  nat- 
ure. Such  a  principle  or  clew  it  seemed  that  we 
might  find  in  the  principle  of  morals.  Seeing  that 
morality  is  generally  recognized  as  an  essential  ele- 
ment in  the  religious  life,  and  as  binding  upon  hu- 
manity in  a  certain  extra-human  sense,  we  pursued 
our  search  by  investigating  the  relation  which  nature 
might  be  found  to  sustain  to  human  morals,  and 
learned  at  length  that  the  moral  law  is  to  be  con- 
strued as  a  form  of  natural  law.  We  showed,  further, 
that  this  law  is  but  a  branch  of  the  more  general  law 
of  conduct  which  is  determined  by  universal  nature 
for  her  particular  creature  man  in  the  specific  form 
of  the  constitution  which  he  has  received  from  the 
hands  of  nature;  which  is,  that  is  to  say,  the  natural 
condition  of  an  end  naturally  and  constitutionally  de- 
sirable. And  this  more  general  law,  which  embraces 
life  as  a  whole  seeking  complete  or  ideal  expression, 
we  identified  with  the  law  of  the  religious  life.  The 
supreme  or  religious  law  was  traced  to  the  form  of 
the  vital  principle  itself. 

Our  two-fold  problem  was  thus  considered  in  its 
second  or  practical  aspect  first.  Religion,  as  a  law 
of  conduct,  refers  us  back  to  the  human  constitution, 
and  tlie  conditions  established  by  nature  under  which 
our  humanity  may  consummate  its  deepest  desire. 
The  law  of  the  religious  life  is  thus,  in  a  profound 
and  real  sense,  a  law  of  nature.  And  it  is  a  rational 
law,  tlu'  law  which  drlines  our  "reasonable  service^^ 
and    that    conformity    with    nature,    fc>lt    rather    tliaii 


pS  NATURE  AND  DEITY 

defined,  which  was  the  guiding  principle  of  the  Stoics. 
For  the  rational  ends  of  life  being  predetermined, 
totrether  with  the  conditions  under  which  this  life 
may  be  realized,  in  the  constitution  which  is  our  gift 
from  nature,  the  life  which  ignores  these  conditions, 
or  makes  irrational  choice  of  means  to  its  end,  is  out 
of  harmon}',  not  indeed  with  all  natural  law,  since 
that  were  impossible,  but  with  the  law  which  nature 
has  prescribed  for  the  attainment  of  the  ultimate  end 
which  it  is  our  nature  to  desire.  It  is  a  discordant 
and  an  irrational  life.  In  an  eminent  sense  it  is  an 
unnatural  life. 

But  the  vital  principle  which  defines  the  office  of 
religion  as  a  law  of  conduct  is  the  very  principle 
which  we  have  been  seeking  as  a  guide  to  the  true 
apprehension  of  nature  as  an  object  of  religious  con- 
templation. The  soul  is  an  essential  unit.  The' 
various  phases  of  life,  practical,  emotional,  intel- 
lectual, are  all  but  various  phases  of  the  same  activity  ; 
and  the  same  constitution  which  determines  the  true 
law  of  conduct,  or  the  practical  law,  discloses  also, 
in  the  discriminations  of  its  sensibility  to  nature  and 
natural  impressions,  a  principle  of  distinction  by 
which  we  may  interpret  the  universal  and  indeter- 
minate being  of  nature  in  a  determinate  and  specific- 
all}"  religious  sense.  In  the  structure  of  the  soul  is 
found  our  criterion  of  the  divine  or  ideal  in  nature 
as  of  the  divine  or  ideal  in  man.  Nature's  inex- 
haustible content  comes  to  the  touch  of  human  feel- 
ing and  is  judged  as  good  or  ill,  or  mean  or 
fine,  with  reference  to  a  norm  prcdeterminrd  by 
nature  in  the  modes  of  our  sensibility  and  the  condi- 


NATURE  AND  DEITY  99 

tions  of  its  idea;  satisfaction.  It  is  the  eye  and  the 
apparatus  of  vision  which  determine  the  ideal  of  color 
and  licrht:  it  is  the  ear  and  its  accessories  which 
determine  the  harmonies  and  perfection  of  sound. 
Or  if  we  allow  with  the  psychologist  that  it  is  the 
whole  organism  which  reacts  upon  the  report  of  each 
special  sense,  it  is  still  the  form  of  our  impressibility 
which  determines  in  its  perfect  or  ideal  gratification 
the  standard  for  every  impression.  And  this  is  true 
of  all  impressions  whatever.  So  much  truth  lies  in 
the  dictum  of  Protagoras.  "  Man  is  the  measure  of  all 
thinc/s."  All  that  enters  into  the  substance  of  nature's 
boundless  complex  must  be  judged  by  the  mind. 
And  the  standard  here,  like  the  standard  of  conduct, 
is  no  arbitrary  or  capricious  standard.  It  is  grained 
in  our  system,  and  its  application  to  the  general  mat- 
ter of  our  impressions,  on  the  one  hand  and  to  the 
determination  of  our  conduct  and  practical  aims,  on 
the  other  hand,  is  lite's  supreme  or  idealizing  func- 
tion. And  life  idealizing  itself  as  a  whole  is  the  relig- 
ious life.  Essentially  it  is  one  and  tlie  same  principle 
which,  in  respect  of  our  conduct,  demands  the  perfect 
development  and  organization  of  our  practical  ener- 
gies, and  which  impels  us,  in  respect  of  the  contem- 
plative or  intellectual  life,  to  search  in  nature  {nr 
order,  ada[itation,  beauty,  sublimity,  and  all  ideal 
aspects  of  nature — all  that  is  perfect! v  responsive  to 
perfected  human  sensibilitv  or  feeling. 

The  religious  life,  thereftjre,  in  either  aspect  re- 
garded, wheth(M-  as  the  searcli  for  the  deity  or  divin- 
ity of  nature  or   as    the   search    for    a    divine    law    of 


lOO  NATURE  AND  DEITY 


conduct,  is  reducible  to  a  single  formula;  the  quest 
of  the  ideal.  This,  in  a  word,  is  the  office  of  religion. 
The  deity  we  seek  and  adore  is  nature  in  her  ideal 
manifestation;  the  law  which  we  revere  as  supreme 
is  the  law  of  the  ideal  life.  And  the  form  of  the  ideal 
has  reference  in  either  case  to  our  nature.  Ulti- 
mately, reiigion  construes  the  universe  and  defines 
the  law  of  lite  with  regard  to  the  principle  of  life 
itself,  referring  this  principle,  again,  back  to  nature, 
the  universal  source  of  life. 

The  religious  interest  centers,  then,  not  in  univer- 
sal power  as  undifferentiated  and  uninterpreted,  but 
in  a  certain  aspect  or  interpretation  of  nature.  Nat- 
ure indefinite,  indeterminate,  unaccented  by  human 
interests,  is  but  a  bewildering  maze  of  change;  but 
in  the  divine  we  regard  the  general  ground  of  nat- 
ure's being  as  manifesting,  or  tending  to  manifest, 
the  perfections  demanded  b}'  human  sentiment  for  its 
perfect  satisfaction.  It  is  the  soul's  specific  sensibil- 
ity which  discriminates,  and  deity  is  nature  as  per- 
fectly responsive  to  the  soul's  demand.  And  wherever 
we  turn  we  discover  this  divinity;  in  germinant  life, 
in  the  play  of  the  elem.ental  forces,  in  the  orbits  of 
the  stars;  and  the  soul,  reflecting  on  itself  as  the 
product  of  the  same  universal  power  which  discloses 
these  perfections,  distinguishes  in  its  own  depth  also 
a  divine  intent,  an  instinct,  or  inspiration,  constrain- 
ing the  life  to  its  ideal  form.  And  even  when  the 
sense  revolts  the  eye  may  discover  an  attendant  per- 
fection. Slime  and  filth  transmit  all  the  wonders  of 
light;  disease,   to  the   pathologist,    may   seem    more 


NATURE  A\D  DEITY  lOI 

beautiful  than  health  ;  and  in  liim  who  may  consider 
it  dispassionately  the  anatomy  of  the  tiger  provokes 
admiration  b}^  its  perfection  as  an  instrument  of  death. 
But  the  perfections  of  nature  are  relative  always  to 
some  specific  type  or  end;  the  ideal  is  limited  by  its 
idea.  And  the  perfect  aspect  of  nature  ma}'  be  but 
the  obverse  of  imperfection  in  the  reverse.  Darkness 
alternates  with  light.  For  each  proof  which  piety 
may  instance  of  God's  goodness  the  skeptic  is  ready 
with  evidence  of  malevolence.  Nay,  piety  itself  has 
recognized  and  personified  the  black  and  untoward 
aspect  of  nature  no  less  than  the  fair  and  propitious; 
and  Ormuzd  must  share  dominion  with  Ahriman, 
God  with  Devil,  Love  with  Hate.  The  universal 
reality,  in  short,  is  a  ccjmposite  of  contrasts  juul  op- 
positions, aspects  of  being  which  vary  as  they  are 
addressed  to  our  various  sensibilities,  or  as  they  ob- 
struct or  reinforce  our  intention  ;  and  which,  it  would 
seem,  we  may  never  perfectly  harmonize,  seeing  that 
perfect  harmony,  in  any  sense  intelligible  to  ourselves 
would  imply  a  universe  created  wholly  in  the  human 
interest  or  with  reference  to  the  huuKui  organism, 
and  so,  as  a  whole,  apprehended;  an  implication 
which  the  rashest  of  dogmatists  would  scarcely  insist 
upon.  The  pantheistic  dream  of  universal  good,  into 
the  terms  of  which  we  may  translate  all  partial  t'vil, 
is  thus  as  unverifiable  as  the  theist's  assnnijnion  of  a 
humani'  providence  struggling  witli  the  perversity  of 
inc()rri<fil)le  nature.  Neverllu'less,  it  is  the  ifood 
alone,  the  good  in  the  broad  jilatonic  sense,  which 
engages  the  nOigious  interest.    Religion,  as   the  pro- 


I02  NATURE  AND  DEITY 

duct  of  the  idealizing  impulse,  sees  and  pursues  the 
ideal  alone.  That  which  it  sees  in  nature — the  deit}'' 
or  divinity  of  nature — is  nature  tending  to  an  ideal 
expression  of  her  typ^s  and  powers;  that  which  it 
seeks  and  conserves  in  humanity  is  the  ideal  expres- 
sion of  the  human  tj-pe. 

And  art  too  dwells  and  works  in  this  ideal  element. 
But  while  the  aesthetic  sense  is  gratified  rather  by 
the  outer  charm  and  the  purity  of  definite  objective 
types,  or  associates  the  forms  and  qualities  of  things 
according  to  a  certain  unit}'  of  sensuous  impression 
determined  by  the  form  of  our  sensibilit}',  the  relig- 
ious sense  penetrates  the  apparent  and  external  form, 
and  searches  the  beautiful,  which  is  the  perfect  in  its 
type,  or  the  sublime,  which  is  nature  in  her  grand- 
eur and  power,  for  the  inner  meaning  or  the  deeper 
law  through  which  it  may  refer  all  types  and  powers 
to  their  universal  source,  aspiring  to  reach  at  length, 
if  that  were  possible,  the  point  of  view  at  which  all 
imperfections  should  vanish,  and  all  forces,  forms, 
and  qualities  should  appear  as  perfections  of  the  uni- 
versal life  apprehended  in  the  unity  of  an  ultimate 
ideal,  an  infinity  of  infinite  perfections.  Religion 
represents,  in  fine,  the  subjective  demand  in  its  pro- 
foundest  intent.  It  includes  art,  in  its  deeper  mean- 
ing, and  all  idealistic  tendencies;  and  though  under 
present  conditions  it  is  mainly  absorbed  in  the  prac- 
tical idealism  of  morals,  nothing  that  pertains  to  the 
refinement  of  the  human  type  or  to  the  realization  of 
human  ideals  is  foreign  to  its  scope. 

And  religion,  reflecting  upon   its   own  origin    and 


NATURE  AND  DEITY  IO3 

aims,  or  attempting   the   s^^stematic  interpretation  of 
man  and  nature  as  in  relation,  generally,  to  the  ideal, 
passes  on  the  other  hand  into  philosophy.      The  phil- 
osophical aim  is  "truth."     The  ideal   here  is   a  per- 
fect general  representation  of  the   created  world  as  it 
is.      The  philosophical  interest,  as  distinguished,  say, 
from    the  practical  interest   or   the   aesthetic   interest, 
impels  us  to  schematize  the  facts  and  the  laws  of  be- 
ing, not  directly  with   a  view  to  re-forming   them  or 
re-disposing  them    in    furtherance    of   some   high    or 
cherished  aim  of  ours,  but  with   reference  in  the  first 
instance  to  the  action  of  the  intellect  in  apprehending 
them.      The  fact,  perfect  or  imperfect  in  its  type,  the 
fact  as  it  exists,  with  the   law  of   its   existence  or   its 
place  in  the  scheme  of  things,  is  here  the  desideratum  ; 
and  philosophy,  as  the  systematization  of  the  sciences 
or  of  the  specific  forms   of   knowledge,  ministers    to 
the  interests  of   the    intellect,  distinctively,  as  an  in- 
strument of  cognition.     But  our  intellectual  interests, 
owing  to  the  interplay  of  function  which  characterizes 
the  organs  of  intellectual   life,  cannot   be  wholly  dis- 
engaged from  other  interests,  and  as  a  matter  of  fact 
the  problems  of  philosophy  have  been  to   a  large  ex- 
tent   religious    problems    because    our    broadest    and 
profoundest    interests,  which    are    the    interests    that 
religion  conserves,  are  those  wliich  naturally  engage 
the  attention  of  conijirchensive    intellects    seeking  lit 
material  for  the    cognitive    faculty  to  act  upon.      No 
profounder  interest,  indeed,  ciui  engage  human  activ- 
ity than  the  relation  of  tiu;  actual  man    in    tlu'   actual 
world  to  man  and  the  world  as  li;;ured  and  dnnanded 


I04  NATURE  AND  DEITY 

by  our  ideals,  which  is  the  relation  to  be  determined, 
if  possible,  by  religious  philosophy.  And  this  is  a  re- 
lation of  fact,  an  object  of  intellectual  cognition.  Re- 
ligious philosophy  is  therefore,  inasmuch  as  it  studies 
a  determinate  relation  established  in  the  order  of  nat- 
ure, a  form  of  natural  philosophy,  and  religion  has 
always  been  found,  in  the  course  of  its  actual  develop- 
ment, in  close  relation  with  man's  cosmological  con- 
ceptions. Our  religious  schemes, it  would  seem, depend 
upon  and  change  with  our  views  of  the  scheme  of 
nature.  But  neither  science,  in  the  ordinary,  more 
physical  sense, nor  thephilosophy  of  science,  is  neces- 
sarily religious.  Knowledge  is  obtained  by  abstrac- 
tion of  specific  parts,  qualities,  or  aspects  of  being  from 
the  whole  of  a  given  content,  and  the  form  of  the  re- 
sults which  "vve  reach  in  the  scientific  contemplation  of 
nature  depends  upon  the  form  of  the  material  which  we 
abstract  for  consideration  from  the  plenum  of  nature. 
By  elimination  of  nature's  inexhaustible  wealth  of 
form  and  quality  we  may  resolve  all  beinginto  bare 
force;  the  study  of  spatial  relations  will  reduce  the 
heavens  and  the  earth  to  the  compass  of  an  astro- 
nomical chart;  or,  inverting  the  order  of  physical  se- 
quence, we  may  come,  in  our  search  for  the  primal 
cause,  upon  an  elemental  star-dust  or  some  primordial 
gas.  Phj^sical,  chemical,  and  mathematical  inquiries 
lead  us  directly  only  to  physical,  chemical,  and  math- 
ematical results.  And,  in  general, the  relations  which 
we  consider  in  what  is  called  the  scientific  investiga- 
tion of  nature  are  highly  specialized  and  abstract, 
representing    nature  with    fidelity,  indeed,  so  far  as 


NATURE    AND    DEITY 


105 


they  go,  but  not    as  in  relation  to  the  vital  and   ideal 
interests  which  are  the  theme  and  motive  of  religious 
thought.      The  mountains    lying   in    the  sunlight  are 
more  than  the  elements    of   their   constituent   rocks; 
something  more  than  a  lesson  in  optics  shines  through 
the  purple  haze  which  blends  their  rugged  lines.   And 
philosophy,  regarded  as  a  mere   synthesis  of   the  ab- 
stractions of  science,  though  it  satisfies  a   noble  curi- 
osity and  occupies  a  necessary'  place  in   that  general 
discipline  and  development  of  our  nature   which  it  is 
the  office  of  religion  to  care   for,  still  leaves  us  cold, 
is  not  yet  "divine''  or  religious  philosophy.     Its  uni- 
verse is  but  a  system  of  forces,causes,  elemental  com- 
binations, and  general  classes — the  mere  anatomy  of 
nature — and  represents   as  incompletely  the    relation 
of   the    universal   reality   to   the    idealizing    tliought 
which  moves  religious  feeling  as   the  chemical  foi'm- 
ula,  two  atoms  of  hydrogen  and  one  atom  of  0x3  gen, 
represents  the  sublimity  of  Niagara  or  the  sea. 

Religious  philosophy  takes  as  its  immediate  subject- 
matter  not  the  fact  which  is,  but  the  fact  which,  on 
demand  of  the  subject  man,  ought  to  be.  Its  theme  is 
an  idea,  the  idea  of  a  perfected  humanity  domiciled 
in  a  perfect  world;  and  it  is  interested  in  the  actual 
world  and  man  in  his  actual  estate,  not  as  mere  mat- 
ters of  fact  to  be  fitted  to  their  place  in  certain 
schemata  of  facts,  but  mainly  and  primarily  as  dis- 
closing the  means  and  C(jnditions  of  the  progressive 
realization  of  this  idea.  Sucli  means  and  conditions 
are,  neverthless,  matters  of  evidence,  antl  capabK'  of 
scientilic  treatment    in    accordance    with    the  laws  of 


I06  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

evidence.  And  though  the  immature  thought  of  man 
has  spurned  the  actual  world  as  impotent  to  satisfy  or 
realize  his  ideals,  and  as  having  no  interest  therefore 
for  the  religious  or  idealizing  mind,  a  more  intelli- 
gent study  of  nature  has  corrected  our  understanding 
of  nature's  methods,  founded  a  new  cosmology,  and 
opened  vistas  of  hope  in  the  natural  world  which  out- 
reach even  the  enthusiast's  fancy  sporting  with  the 
insubstantial  elements  of  an  imagined  world.  Changes 
vast  and  revolutionary,  it  appear,  are  but  the  cumu- 
lative effect  of  graduated  and  unperceived  mutation ; 
and  natural  idealism,  studious  of  nature's  ways,  con- 
ceives that  man  may  grow  step  by  step  into  that 
which  he  ought  to  be  as  the  earth  step  by  step  was 
fitted  for  his  habitation.  It  seeks  to  root  itself,  ac- 
cordingl}',  in  the  ground  of  fact;  in  the  constitution 
of  nature,  the  ultimate  source  of  life  and  power;  in 
the  constitution  of  man,  whose  life  it  seeks  to  perfect. 
A  knowledge  of  facts  as  they  are,  and  a  clear  rec- 
ognition of  the  laws  of  growth  actually  operative,  are 
as  necessary  to  the  elaboration  of  productive  and  en- 
during ideals  as  is  the  constructive  energy  of  the 
imagination  itself  which  bodies  forth  the  forms  of 
things  as  yet  unknown  in  nature.  Da  Vinci  and 
Angelo,  idealists  of  color  and  form,  were  anatomists 
too,  and  students  of  the  living  model.  Dante,  Shake- 
speare, Balzac,  had  been  but  ineffective  idealists  of  the 
motives  and  the  passions  of  life,  had  they  been  less 
profoundly  versed  in  the  actual  experience  of  life. 
And  all  the  various  and  special  arts,  born  of  a  special 
subjective  need,  and  striving  for  unity  and  perfection 


NATURE  AND  DEITY  IO7 

of  expression  in  their  several  creations  in  response  to 
this  need,  depend    upon  the  artist's   mastery  of  some 
aspect   of   nature   which    he    represents   under   ideal 
forms,  or  of  some  mode  of  human  sensibility  to  which 
he  offers  ideal  gratification.      Religion,  on   the  other 
hand,  is  related  to  all  impressions  and  all  unities,  and 
represents  the  im.pulse  of  the   soul  to  perfect  itself  as 
an  organic  whole  harmonized  with    the   organic    life 
of   nature.      It   idealizes    our   humanity,    and    would 
surround  it  with   an  ideal    world,    unifying  man    and 
the  world  as   concurrent   effects  or   expressions   of  a 
common  power  which    tends  everywhere   to  express 
itself  in  ideal  forms.      But    religion,    that    is,  natural 
as  opposed  to  conventional  religion,  must  begin  with 
man  and  the  world    as  they    are.      Its    ideals   can  be 
realized  only  through    development  of  the   actual    in 
conformity  with  the   actual    laws   of  growth,  and    its 
need  of  knowledge    is  as  profound  as   is  the  primary 
need  or  aspiration    which    religion    seeks   to  satisfy. 
There  is  nothing  in  the  entire  circle  of  the  sciences, 
in  fact,  which  has  not,  either  as  instrument  or   disci- 
pline, a   bearing  upon  the  religious    problem.      The 
interest  of  rclij/icjn  is  of  course  most  vital  in  the  facts 
and  laws  which    are   most   deepl}'  related   to   human 
welfare,  in  the  fiicts  and  laws  of  the  inner  life.      But 
the  sympathit;s  of  religion  are  universal.    Its  interests 
are  coextensive  with  the  human  inierest,  and  the  op- 
position betwe  Ml  scii-nce  and  religion  exists    only  so 
far  as  religion  assumes  a  false  basis  of  fact,  or  a  the- 
ory of  nature  and  natural  law  which  will  not  bear  the 
minute  and  patient  analysis  of  science  in  its  effort  to 


I08  NATURE  AND  DEITY 

attain  to  a  just  apprehension  of  the  fact.  Religion 
iij  conflict  with  science,  or  that  which  is  known,  is 
in  en-ror.  Religion  may  offer  us  fair  ideals,  never- 
theless, while  yet  cherishing  many  illusions  of  fact; 
but  it  cannot  maintain  such  supremacy  as  comports 
wnth  the  dignity  of  its  aims  until  it  becomes  a  more 
patient  student  of  nature  as  we  lind  her,  until  it  ceases, 
in  spleen,  or  in  despair  of  nature's  aid,  to  project  all 
its  hopes  into  other  and  imagined  worlds,  and  sub- 
mits its  ideals  as  types  for  realization  by  actual  men 
in  the  real  world.  True  religion  is  the  true  law  of 
growth.  Its  datum  is  the  actual;  but  its  function  is 
the  cultus  of  the  ideal,  that  is,  to  develop  the  actual, 
to  give  true  form  and  tendency  to  the  real,  to  lure 
and  guide  and  shape  that  which  is  to  that  which 
ought  to  be. 

And  the  effort  of  religion  to  exceed  this  its  true 
function,  and  to  grasp  at  something  which  it  calls 
the  good  absolute,  must  always  fail.  Man,  mortal 
and  iinite,  can  do  no  more  than  orient  himself  and 
better  himself  and  his  estate  in  an  infinity  where 
the  liuman  element,  though  of  the  substance  of  the 
infinite,  is  but  an  element.  The  soul,  specific  and 
human  in  its  quality,  needs  but  meat  for  its  proper 
sustenance  and  room  for  the  play  of  its  peculiar  fac- 
ult}^;  and  its  reasonable  demand,  its  sole  object,  ra- 
tionally apprehended,  is  to  find  in  the  wide  range  of 
the  world  such  sustenance,  such  opportunity;  no 
more.  But  religious  philosophy,  forgetful  of  the  es- 
sential human  reference  in  all  our  standards,  and  ves- 
ting the  soul's  demand  for   perfection    relative  to  the 


NATURE  AND  DEITY  IO9 

needs  of  its  kind  with  the  efficacy  of  a  law  applicable 
to  the  universe  in  its  infinitude,  assumes  that  our 
idea  is  the  form  to  which  infinite  and  eternal  being 
must  be  compressed,  and  wastes  itself  in  the  struggle 
to  round  out  our  general  impression  of  nature  into 
a  total  unity, in  which  all  particular  impressions, good 
or  ill,  perfect  or  imperfect,  may  appear,  tried  by  some 
ultimate  standard,  as  all  alike  harmonious  and  per- 
fect. The  effort  is  not,  indeed,  fruitless.  As  the 
vision  widens  deformity  and  disproportion  tend  to 
disappear.  The  broken  line  which  bounds  our  hori- 
zon at  the  level  of  common  life  rounds  into  the  full 
circle  as  we  ascend.  And  it  is  the  dream  of  philos- 
oph}',  theistic,  deistic,  pantheistic,  to  reach  such  ele- 
vation of  view  that  all  evil  and  insufficiency  may 
suffer  a  divine  transformation,  and  the  actual  itself 
be  seen  in  its  totality  as  the  absolute  ideal.  Color  of 
justification  for  this  presumption  comes  even  from 
science  as  it  broadens.  When  we  see  the  physicist 
watching  in  awe  the  action  of  the  forces  of  crystalli- 
zation and  showing  us  in  the  bod}^  of  death  an  im- 
manent lieauty  and  life;  when  we  see  the  naturalist 
tracing  the  steps  by  which  nature,  even  through 
rajiine  and  greed,  lends  her  creatures  a  keener  intel- 
ligence or  a  finer  grace;  it  seems  not  impossible  that 
the  science  which  is  stigmatized  as  profane,  and 
whicli,  in  the  rigor  of  its  scrutiny  of  the  facts,  is 
wont  to  discredit  the  idealist  as  warping  the  vision  to 
a  f:dse  ch-w  and  hiiidcrinir  knowleilj^e,  sliould  itself 
suggest  a  more  comprehensive  view  of  nature,  and 
resolve  away  ci^rtain    of  the  perplex ltit\s  of   religious 


no  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

thought.  And  this  progressive  expansion  and  or- 
ganization of  thought  is  the  life  of  thought.  But  our 
progress  brings  us  no  nearer,  it  would  seem  to  a  final 
consummation;  is  itself,  indeed,  an  infinite  progress; 
and  an  ideal  unity  in  which  every  phase  and  detail 
of  being  shall  find  its  place  as  in  all  relations  good 
and  fair  appears  to  be  as  unattainable  as  a  mental 
representation  of  universal  being  rounded  off  into 
a  physical  unit  or  whole.  Nature  can  not  be  reduced 
in  idea  even  to  the  scale  of  the  human  relations  which 
are  implied  in  our  ideals.  Man  is  in  nature;  he  is 
not  to  be  assumed  as  the  end  of  nature;  and  the  ends 
to  which  human  nature,  harmonized  with  itself,  and 
happy  in  means  and  opportunity  of  harmonious  self- 
expression,  must  ever  tend  are  yet  too  specific  and 
narrow  to  be  imposed  upon  the  being  of  nature  gen- 
erally. The  ideal  law  is  natural  law;  but  it  is  natural 
law  as  related  to  human  sensibility  and  auxiliary  to 
human  needs.  Nature  in  her  various  kinds,  or  nature 
for  herself  and  in  her  universalit}^,  can  not  be  tried 
by  the  laws  of  human  conduct  or  constrained  to  the 
compass  of  human  aims.  She  offers,  nevertheless, 
infinite  recourse  to  the  activity  of  the  human  mind. 
Herself  without  limit,  and  eluding  all  effort  to  com- 
press her  infinitude  to  the  measure  of  a  finite  idea, 
she  opposes  no  limit  to  the  idealizing  course  of  hu- 
man thought.  The  search  for  the  divine  can  never 
end. 


IX. 


God's  wisdom  and  goodness! — Ay,  but  fools 
Misdefine  these  till  God  knows  thern  no  more. 
Wisdom  and  goodness,  they  are  God. 

— Mattheiv  Arnold. 

Schadliche  Wahrheit,  ich  ziehe  sie  vor  dem  niitzlichen  Irrthum. 
Wahrhe  it  heilet  den  Schmerz  den  sie  vielleicht  uns  erregt. 

Goethe. 

Religion  we  define,  then,  as  the  quest  or  cultus 
of  the  ideal.  It  is  distinguishable  from  the  arts 
wliich  relate  to  special  foims  of  the  idealizing  impulse 
in  that  it  embraces  our  nature  in  its  entirety;  and 
whereas  these  special  arts  are  occupied  for  the  most 
part  in  creating  exemplars  of  their  several  ideals,  the 
practical  or  formative  elTort  of  religion  is  directed  to 
the  amelioration  of  our  humanity  generally,  or  to  the 
progressive  assimilation  of  the  human  type,  in  its 
most  comprehensive  sense,  to  the  human  ideal.  Ikit 
the  human  organization,  thougli  specific  among  nat- 
ure's innumerable  species,  is,  as  we  have  seen,  the 
key  or  touchstone  of  the  ideal,  as  the  human  mind 
must  conceive  it,  universally;  and  the  more  perfect 
the  human  organization  as  in  relation  to  its  own  ideal, 
the  more  complete  is  its  I'lficiency  as  an  instnmient 
for  the  interpretation  of  tlie  universe  in  its  divine  or 
ideal  aspect  generally.      Thus  religion,  strenuous   to 

perfect  the  human  type,  passes  from    nitUi  to    nature, 

111 


112  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

essaying  the  interpretation  of  all  particular  forms, 
forces,  qualities,  and  tendencies  as  perfections  rela- 
tive to  the  universal  life  of  nature  But  the  actual 
we  cannot  resolve  wholly  into  the  unity  of  the  ideal. 
Nature  cannot  be  grasped  in  unit}^  or  as  a  whole,  in 
her  mere  reality  ;  much  less  can  she  be  comprehended 
in  an  ideal  unity,  or  harmonized  in  all  her  visible 
aspects  with  standards  of  perfection  paramount  for 
man,  but  relative  ultimately  to  the  human  organiza- 
tion, and  therefore  specific,  not  universal  standards. 
The  search  for  the  ideal  is,  nevertheless,  the  essential 
function  of  religion.  In  the  life  of  man,  or  in  nature's 
infinite  life,  the  religious  enthusiast  must  pursue  his 
idea,  which,  though  never  perfectly  realized,  is  yet 
forever  in  process  of  realization. 

For  all  things  have  their  divine  or  ideal  aspect. 
Though  the  infinity  of  nature  mocks  our  attempts  to 
reduce  the  universe  of  being  to  the  limits  of  an}^  par- 
ticular idea,  the  religious  soul  is  conscious  of  divine 
suggestion  in  every  natural  thing.  And  this,  the  di- 
vinity of  nature,  is  the  Deity  of  our  aspirations,  the 
Ideal,  the  omnipresent  Good,  that  we  adore.  Obey- 
ing the  common  tendency  of  thought  to  clothe  its 
more  distinctive  ideas  with  individuality  and  inde- 
pendence, men  have  personified  this  ideal,  parting  it 
from  nature  conceived  as  impersonal  and  created,  as 
if  it  were  another  nature,  distinct,  personal,  and  cre- 
ative. But  the  ideal,  thus  parted  from  nature,  is 
parted  only  in  our  thought.  The  reality,  so  far  as 
the  ideal  is  real  is  in  nature,  and  is,  as  reality,  insep- 
arable from  nature,  who  is  at  once  created   and  ere- 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  II3 

ative  [jiatiira  nattirata  and  natiira  iiaticrans).  And  it 
were  as  reasonable — as  a  process  of  thought  it  would, 
in  fact,  be  the  same — to  abstract  and  personify  the 
principle  of  evil  as  to  abstract  and  personify  the  prin- 
ciple of  goodness,  for  the  evil  which  we  shun  and 
the  good  which  we  pursue  are  but  converse  aspects 
of  nature,  discriminated  b^-  our  organization  as  men, 
and  having  real  existence,  not  as  beings  or  essences 
dissociated  from  nature,  but  as  alike  included  in  her 
universal  reality.  Deity  therefore,  truly  conceived, 
is  God,  the  Ideal,  or  the  Spirit  of  the  Good,  manifest 
in  nature.  The  divine  is  not  to  be  dissevered,  save 
in  the  abstraction  of  our  thought,  from  nature.  It 
is  an  aspect  or  principle  or  tendency  of  nature,  em- 
phasized by  human  feeling  and  human  aspirations, 
to  which  it  is  so  nearly  and  so  profoundly  related  that 
for  us  it  is  supreme  as  a  principle  directive  of  our  vis- 
ion or  apprehension  of  nature;  but  the  reality  in  which 
this  principle  is  manifest,  the  actual  being  in  which 
the  spirit  or  process  of  the  ideal  appears,  is  the  being 
of  nature. 

But  it  is  in  humanity,  of  all  nature's  products,  that 
we,  as  men,  must  look  for  our  true  Avatar.  Here, 
for  us,  is  the  true  incarnation  of  deity,  in  the  coales- 
cence of  the  human  and  the  divine;  naliu'e  in  the 
brief  span  of  a  human  lift'  and  nature  in  the  long 
story  of  humanity's  ascending  progression  tending  to 
the  more  perfect  embodiment  of  the  human  tvjH'.  In 
the  older  thouglit  tlie  operation  of  deity  was  as  an 
extra-natural  inlhience  jilaving  from  without  upon 
the  human  faculty,  and  bearing  it  on  to  achievement 


114  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

above  the  plane  of  merely  natural  action.  But  to  the 
naturalist  the  voice  of  deity  is  a  natural  voice;  the 
inspired  thought,  in  religion  and  morals  as  in  litera- 
ture and  art,  is  still  a  natural  thought.  The  change 
in  the  point  of  view  is  indeed  momentous,  and  far- 
reaching  etlects  must  follow  the  change.  And  new 
wine,  we  have  been  warned,  should  not  be  put  into 
old  bottles.  But  though  in  the  long  process  of  growth 
into  which  we  now  resolve  the  incomplete  story  of 
creation  much  is  outgrown,  the  truth  which  com- 
mends itself  as  new  has  grown  out  of  the  old  and  is 
vital  with  the  life  of  the  old  ;  and  it  seems  not  unfitting 
that  the  ideal,  long  associated  with  the  thought  of 
deity,  should  still  be  called  divine,  and  that  religion, 
whose  peculiar  office  (so  far  as  it  has  not  been  per- 
vert^ to  the  mere  conservation  of  vested  interests 
and  conventional  opinion)  has  been  to  keep  alive 
our  sense  of  deity  as  idealized  being,  should  yet  dis- 
charge the  same  high  function,  though  the  divinity 
which  we  worship  is  found  in  humanity,  and  in  fa- 
miliar and  companionable  nature,  whom  we  cease  to 
revere  only  as  we  strip  her  of  her  divinity  to  clothe 
the  supernatural  withal.  Deity,  in  the  earlier  philos- 
ophies but  the  intellectual  or  disposing  principle  of 
nature,  then  the  hypostasis  of  natural  power,  and 
afterwards  dissevered  from  and  conceived  in  opposi- 
tion to  nature,  comes  again  at  length  in  the  revolution 
of  modern  thought  back  to  nature,  immanent,  inher- 
ent, indissociable  from  the  life  of  nature. 

But  this  divinity  in  nature,  or   in  human    nature — 
is  it  in  truth  the  deity  we  needs  must   worship?    Re- 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  I  I 


ligion  has  so  long  been  associated  with  a  personality 
assumed  to  be  distinct  from  and  superior  to  nature 
that,  with  some  impatience  perhaps,  one  may  ask, 
"Why  yet  talk — if  we  are  convinced  of  the  futility 
of  all  attempts  to  transcend  the  natural  order — wh}^ 
yet  talk  of  religion  or  religious  inspiration,  or  darken 
counsel  with  terms  that  have  lost  their  significance? 
If  the  supernatural  be  indeed  extinct,  what  remains 
but  a  supposititious  deity  to  kindle  the  religious  fire? 
In  reducing  the  divine  to  the  plane  of  nature  we  have 
so  changed  the  form  of  deity,  it  would  seem,  that  we 
have  lost  the  substance.  We  may  oppose  the  natural 
force  of  the  soul  to  the  unpitying  force  of  nature 
without;  but  religion — if  we  are  abandoned  to  such 
tenderness  as  resides  in  nature's  impersonal  laws, 
what  is  there  left  of  religion? 

The  change  which  the  change  in  our  attitude  to- 
ward nature  must  work  in  religion  is  indeed  so  pro- 
found that  its  effects  can  Ijardly  be  overstated.  The 
abolition  of  the  practices  of  idolatrx^  the  absorption 
of  polytheistic  powers  in  a  single  supreme  power, 
wrought  changes  less  radical  perhaps  in  their  inlluence 
upon  the  habit  of  the  mind  than  the  clianges  involved 
in  th(^  reversion  of  our  belahorc^d  and  conxcnlional- 
ized  thought  from  the  supernatural  liack  to  the 
natural.  Init  wi^  have  seen  that  a  law  of  life  founded 
in  some  theory  of  our  relation  to  universal  law  is  a 
necessity  of  the  rati(M)al  and  rellecting  mind,  and  re- 
ligion, wliich  claims  absolute  authority  over  the  con- 
duct of  life,  is  for  eiieh  man  jiroperly  iil«  iililiecl,  in  its 
philosophical  aspect,  witli  the  doctrine  which  to  him 


Il6  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

accounts  for  such  authority.  And  the  form  of  relig- 
ious thought  in  general  has  been  tending  steadily, 
though  in  part,  perhaps,  unconsciously,  in  the  direc- 
tion which,  in  virtue  of  the  changes  it  is  undergoing, 
it  must  hereafter  consciously  pursue.  There  is,  in- 
deed, a  stage  in  religious  development  when  the  force 
of  the  ideal  does  not  yet  appear,  when  religion  is 
little  more  than  a  timorous  effort  to  propitiate  a  for- 
midable and  malignant  power  by  means  such  as 
might  appease  human  wrath;  and  there  are  doctrines 
in  our  lately  dominant  theories  which  carry  unmis- 
takable traces  of  this  earlier  and  ruder  phase  of  relig- 
ion. But  since  the  absorption  of  ethics  by  religion, 
idealistic  tendencies  have  become  more  and  more 
pronounced  in  religious  thought.  The  object  of  re- 
ligious worship  has  been  more  and  more  completely 
identified  with  the  moral  ideal,  and  the  belief  in  hell 
is  at  length  disappearing,  not  so  much  on  account  of 
the  weakness  of  the  evidence  for  its  existence — or  the 
belief  in  a  local  heaven  might  have  shared  its  decay 
— as  on  account  of  the  incompatibility  of  endless 
suffering,  endured  by  any  creature,  with  the  ideal 
attributes  ascribed  to  the  creator.  And  the  force  of 
the  ethical  ideal  is  undoubtedly  becoming  in  religion 
the  governing  force.  Indeed,  so  far  as  we  can  per- 
ceive through  the  mass  of  speculative  and  fanciful 
matter  with  which  the  great  religions  have  been  over- 
laid, it  was  the  intention  of  their  founders,  long  ago, 
to  give  it  predominance.  But  they  were  interested 
in  the  practical  issue  rather  than  in  the  theoretical 
basis  of  their  teachings,  and  if  it  appears  to  our  later 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  II7 

thought  that  ethical  law  is  not  the  mere  fiat  of  a  su- 
pernatural lawgiver,  as  they  may  have  believed,  but 
a  form  of  natural  law,  we  are  still,  as  learners  of  the 
ethical  life,  in  harmony  with  the  great  teachers  whose 
constant  minds  and  heroic  lives  gave  to  ethics  its 
preponderant  force  in  religion  and  merged  their  im- 
mortal figures  in  our  immortal  ideals.  Hence,  how- 
ever radical  the  changes  which  we  introduce  into  the 
philosophy  of  religion,  if  the  ethical  ideal  is  kept 
steadily  in  view  the  main  content  or  the  substance  of 
religion,  as  religion  is  represented  in  the  lives  and 
teachings  of  its  greatest  leaders,  is  not  changed. 
We  have  in  morals  a  binding  element  uniting  the  new 
with  the  old.  The  moral  law,  transformed  from  a 
personal  into  a  natural  law,  becomes  a  means  of 
transition  from  the  personal  to  the  natural  theory  of 
reliction. 

In  making  this  transition,  therefore,  we  do  not 
abrogate  the  ofiice  of  religion.  We  simply  ration- 
alize its  theory.  Taking  up  substantially  as  we  lind 
it  the  ethical  elemen%  which  is  central  or  tends  to 
become  central  in  the  older  systems,  we  allow  it,  in 
terms  and  with  deliberate  preference,  tlie  same  central 
importance;  tracing  then  the  form  of  this  ideal  to 
the  form  of  our  nature,  we  show  its  relation  to  a  yet 
broader  ideal  which  is  referrible  to  the  same  general 
principle,  namely,  the  elTort  of  our  nature  to  seek  its 
fullest  satisfaction  in  the  fullest  expression  of  its  es- 
sential vilalitv;  and  the  moral  ideal  thus  rationalized 
and  expaniled  becomes  the  religious  ideal,  the  pur- 
suit of  which  yields  the  profoundest    happiness,  ''the 


Il8  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

peace  which  passeth  all  understanding,"  and  con- 
stitutes the  religious  life.  Religion  is  therefore  neither 
destroyed  nor  displaced  by  something  substantial!}' 
unlike  it.  It  is  simply  developed.  That  is  to  say, 
the  gap  between  the  new  thought  and  the  old  faith  is 
not  so  wide  that  w^e  need  break,  or  attempt  to  break, 
the  continuity  of  the  line  of  religious  growth ;  or, 
rather,  there  is  no  gap,  we  develop  a  naturalistic  sys- 
tem from  the  naturalistic  elements  which  religion 
already  contained.  The  theory  of  a  personal  deity, 
personal  in  the  specifically  human  sense  upon  wnich 
many  3'et  insist,  indeed  falls  away;  and  to  the  dog- 
matist on  the  one  hand,  or  the  skeptic  on  the  other, 
who  maintains  that  this  hypothesis,  with  the  super- 
naturalism  which  it  involves,  is  essential  matter  of 
religion,  its  decay  means  of  course  the  decline  and 
fall  of  religion.  But  we  have  to  guard  ourselves  here 
against  the  seduction  of  scholastic  disputes  about 
names  and  essences;  and  in  dealing  with  a  matter 
so  comprehensive  as  religion,  so  subjective  in  its  na- 
ture, and  so  inevitably  modified  b}'  constant  and 
progressive  change,  it  would  seem  that  critical  con- 
sideration were  more  profitably  directed  to  the  truth 
or  falsity  of  its  content  as  we  find  it  than  to  any  at- 
tempt to  conclusively  determine  the  essential  impli- 
cation of  the  name.  It  is  our  contention  that  the 
substance  of  religion  is  not  changed  by  the  substitu- 
tion of  a  natural  for  a  supernatural  theory,  and  that 
the  particular  form  in  which  we  conceive  of  the  power 
which  is  recoornized  as  the  ultimate  source  and 
sanction  of  the   laws  of    human  well-being  is  less  es- 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  II9 

sential,  having  been  the  subject  of  constant  change, 
than  the  recognition  of  the  fact  that  some  such  power, 
whatever  the  form  in  which  we  apprehend  it,  exists. 
But,  however  th.is  may  be,  the  existence  of  such 
power,  natural  or  supernatural,  will  hardly  be  denied ; 
and  if  the  s^'stem  of  thought  or  tlie  law  of  life  which 
the  mind,  maturing  its  reflections,  constructs  about 
its  conception  of  such  power,  conceived  as  natural 
power,  shall  not  be  called  religion,  it  will  at  least 
occupy  the  place  which  has  been  occupied  by  relig- 
ion, and  the  question  of  names  may  be  left  to  take 
care  of  itself.  To  us  no  name  seems  so  fitting  as  that 
of  religion.  But  if  its  litness  be  disputed  we  shall  not 
be  very  strenuous  to  insist  on  the  name.  It  is  not  the 
verbal  symbol,  but  the  momentous  truth  which  is 
symbolized,  which  is  our  present  concern. 

But  the  mind  is  as  yet  tender  of  its  errors,  and 
misses  in  the  face  of  unfamiliar  truths  the  warmth 
and  intimacy  of  the  illusions  displaced  by  the  truth. 
Religion  consecrates  all  things,  true  or  false,  with 
which  it  is  allied,  and  we  have  looked  so  long  upon 
nature  as  dependent  upon  extraneous  power  that  the 
investiture  of  nature  with  her  natural  rii^lits  is  resented 
as  sacrilegious.  The  theistic  prejudice  has  discred- 
ited nature.  We  ignore,  or  take  for  granted  simjih', 
the  common  and  standin<£  miracle  of  natural  beino;, 
or  gaze  at  it  as  a  mere  mechanic  wonder,  the  inven- 
tion of  a  non-resident  mind  ;  or  if  tlu^  awe  and  ad- 
miration inspired  by  the  vastness  and  perfection  of 
nature's  works  ran  not  be  repressed,  thev  are  diverted 
from  their  propi  r  ohj  'ct,  the  immanent  life  and  powci' 


I20  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

of  nature,  to  the  transcendent  being  assumed  as  nat- 
ure's designer.  But  science  has  opened  the  book  of 
a  new  revelation.  The  infinite  and  eternal  has  de- 
scended from  the  clouds  and  shines  in  the  dust.  And 
with  the  juster  thought  of  nature  comes  a  sense  of 
emancipation,  a  feeling  of  security  and  reality,  as  if 
one  were  escaping  from  the  phantasmata  and  spells 
of  enchantment  into  the  familiar  world  and  the  plain 
light  of  day.  If  an  illusion  lost  is  nevertheless  a  loss, 
the  truth  frankly  accepted  brings  fresh  inspiration. 
We  may  allow  that  the  source  of  that  inspiration 
through  which  human  feeling  in  the  past  reached  its 
highest  plane  was  conceived  in  many  aloft}'  mind  as 
personal  and  as  more  or  less  disparted  from,  nature. 
The  fact  could  not  well  be  otherwise.  Feeling  takes 
its  clew  and  tendence  from  the  thought,  and  where 
the  mind  through  the  undeveloped  form  of  its  knowl- 
edge sees  in  nature  no  original  power  or  direction  it 
traces  the  source  of  its  own  life  and  inspiration  inev- 
itably to  a  non-natural  director  of  nature.  But  the 
truer  insight  made  possible  by  the  expansion  of 
knowledge  will  give  the  feeling  a  truer  form.  And 
the  conception  of  divinity  as  the  expression  of  the 
infinite  and  eternal  under  ideal  forms,  which  is  the 
underlying  conception  of  developed  religious  thought, 
will  lose  nothing  of  its  religious  qualit}' by  translation 
from  the  domain  of  speculative  shadows  to  the  natural 
realm.  It  may  be  said  indeed  that  religious  feeling 
has  survived  in  spite  of  theorists  and  dogmatists. 
The  cumbrous  structures  which  have  imposed  them- 
selves upon    religious   thought  have    borrowed    from 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  121 

the  sweetness  and  sincerity  of  devout  and  simple  souls 
more  of  vitality  than  they  have    given,  and    when    a 
truer  apprehension    of  our  relations   to    nature    shall 
have  allied  itself  with  our  instincts  and    ranged  itself 
with  the  general  furniture  of  the  mind   our   devotion 
to  the  ideal  law  need  discover  no  less  singleness  and 
strength  than  the  devotion  of  the  long  roll  of  martyrs 
who  have  witnessed  the  power  of  the  ideal.    Nor  need 
we  fear,  as  many  seem  to  fear,  that  tlie  moral  ideal,  if  it 
shall  lack  the  extraneous  support  of  conventional  re- 
ligion, must  needs  decay.      Its   strength   is  inherent. 
True,  it  has  so  long  been  allied  with    the   dogmas  of 
religion  that  to  the  timid  it  may  seem  a   perilous  ex- 
periment to   bare   the  doctrine  of   morals  of  its   time- 
worn  associations;  but  time   was   when    the    alliance 
was  but    feeble,  or  as  yet  not  formed,  and  the  moral 
sense,  independent  in  its    origin,  grew    then  with  an 
independent    strength.      And   it  grew  to    such    vigor 
that  it  even  invaded  the   realm  of   reli^jion  and  com- 
pelled  on  Olympus  the  reformation  of  the  old  immoral 
gods,  as   lately  in    chiistendom  it   has   slaked,  if  not 
extinguished,  certain  subterranean    fires.      Religion, 
or  what  is    taught   as    religion,    needs    rather  borrow 
stiength  from  morals  than  that  morals  should  depend 
on  religion.    Our  ideals,  imperfect  as  they  are,  spring 
from  the  depths  of  our  being,  and  are    as    ineradica- 
ble as  any  principle  of  our  being;  and  without  doubt 
the  moral  ideal,  conceived  as  embraced    in    the  gen- 
eral ideal    which  we    have    here    identified    with    the 
religious,  will  llourish  as  vigorou^lv  under  the  disci- 
pline of  science  as  ever  it  llourished  under  the  tyranny 


122  NATURE   AND    DEITY 

of  dogma.  It  is  a  baseless  dread  which  distrusts 
our  hiter  thought.  All  that  ever  was  now  as  really 
is.  And  if  it  be  possible,  as  the  too  optimistic  thinker 
would  aver,  that  even  the  illusions  of  the  mind  as  it 
moves  from  stage  to  stage  are  beneficent,  can  we 
doubt,  when  we  consider  the  cumulative  effects  of 
error,  that  is  better,  always,  where  it  is  possible,  to 
know  that  which  is,  as  it  is;  that  the  truth,  as  com- 
pared with  error,  must  be  yet  more  beneficent? 

But  the  aspirations  here  identified  with  the  sub- 
stance of  the  religious  impulse  are  too  intermittent 
and  too  feeble,  it  may  be  said,  to  influence  the  lives 
of  men  in  general  as  they  have  been  influenced  here- 
tofore by  religion  ;  only  imaginative  minds,  or  minds 
of  relatively  high  development,  conceive  the  ideal  as 
a  motive  for  action.  With  the  masses  of  men,  who 
accept  themselves  frankly  as  the}'  are,  it  is  simply 
the  strongest  propensity  that  rules;  and  ideal  laws, 
having  no  reality  in  their  minds,  no  edge  to  cut  their 
sensibilities,  can  exert  no  real  influence  on  their  lives. 
Religion  as  here  interpreted  is  too  impalpable  for  the 
gross  uses  of  the  world.  To  become  a  power  among 
men  it  must  touch  them  where  they  can  feel. 

If  it  were  simply  a  question  of  devising,  under  the 
name  of  religion,  the  means  for  coercing  all  sorts  and 
conditions  of  men  into  the  form  of  goodness,  and  if 
the  truth  of  our  creeds  or  the  sincerity  of  our  profes- 
sions bore  no  essential  relation  to  the  moral  or  relig- 
ious life,  we  might  spare  ourselves  the  pains  of 
scrutiny,  and  offer  our  adherence  to  the  highest  bid- 
der,   to   the    propagandist     who    promises     most    or 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  1 23 

threatens  most.  And,  undisturbed  b}'  the  question 
of  evidence,  we  might  still  urge,  with  the  propagan- 
dist's recklessness  and  fervor,  the  material  pleasures 
of  heaven,  the  sensible  pains  of  hell.  But  where  the 
truth  is  in  question  the  matter  of  evidence  should  cut 
a  certain  figure.  And  if  we  believe  that  our  religious 
difficulties  will  never  be  settled  except  through  inde- 
pendent conviction  of  the  truth  as  determined  by  the 
evidence,  it  is  our  duty  to  apply  the  tests  of  truth  to 
the  postulates  of  religious  teachers  without  the  bias 
which  a  tremulous  consideration  of  results  is  certain 
to  give  to  our  estimate  of  the  evidence.  There  may 
be  those  who  are  persuaded,  with  Plato,  that  any 
•'useful"  fiction  may  be  paraded  before  the  ignorant 
and  superstitious  as  truth,  assuming,  it  would  seem, 
that  the  ill-instructed  may  be  entrapped  or  cajoled 
into  conformity  with  a  law  which  the}'  would  never 
respect  on  its  merits.  But  can  we  believe  that  a  great 
delusion  will  work  as  a  great  moral  force?  Veracity, 
veracity  of  insight  as  well  as  veracity  of  expression, 
is  (as  Plato  himself  perceived)  of  the  very  fiber  of 
the  moral  life,  and  whatever  specious  advantage  is  to 
be  won  by  deceit,  we  cannot  build  up  a  sound  moral- 
it}  by  systematic  fraud. 

'Sage,  thun  wir  nicht    Kecht?     Wir  miissen  den  Pobel  betruj^en; 

Sieh  nur,  wie  ungeschicht,  sieh  nur,  wie  uiki  er  sich  zeigl! 
Ungeschichl  unci  wildsind  alle  rohe  Betrogenen: 

Seyd  nur  redlich,  und  so  fuhrt  ihn  zum  Menschlichen  an.' 

Insincerity  and  hyjiocrisy  will  scarcely  be  avowed, 
it  is  true,  as  allies  of  religion  ;  and  the  brand  of  the 
liar,  ev(Mi  among  tlic  iiieligious,  isthehotlv  resented 
brand  of  shame.    And  yvi  do  not  our  religious  teach- 


124  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

ers  discredit  the  truth  by  discrediting  an  uncompro- 
mising application  of  the  tests  of  truth?  Do  they  not, 
in  all  solemnit}',  affirm  as  fact  matters  wl  ich  they 
have  never  scrutinized  ?  as  truth,  principles  which 
they  have  never  disussed  or  dare  not  deny?  But  man 
must  know  where  he  stands.  We  cannot  play  fast 
and  loose  with  nature  and  her  immutable  laws.  Nor 
are  the  fundamental  principles  of  religious  philoso- 
phy so  easy  of  determination  that  we  may  dispense 
with  criticism  and  evidential  tests,  or  light-heartedly 
assume  the  truth  of  any  principle  which  seems  to  us 
beneficent.  The  evils  which  a  false  principle  entails 
are  cumulative,  and  in  the  beginning  may  be  com- 
pletely disguised.  It  is  the  sounder  practice,  taking 
one  step  at  a  time,  to  assure  ourselves  by  every  test 
that  ma}'  be  applied  that  each  step  as  we  take  it  is  on 
solid  ground. 

The  prior  question  here,  then,  is  the  truth  of  ideal- 
ism, not  its  force  as  a  motive.  It  may  be  shown, 
nevertheless,  that  the  ideal  is  in  fact  a  force  among 
men,  and  is  something  more  than  a  delicacy  for  the 
refined.  Ideal  motives  may  be  present,  indeed, 
where  there  is  little  suspicion  of  their  presence.  Every 
impulse  or  facult}^  tends,  in  proportion  to  its  strength 
and  the  completeness  of  its  development,  to  create  in 
the  mind  a  standard,  or  an  ideal  law,  determining 
from  within  the  measure  and  form  of  its  ac[i\itv. 
The  eye  will  revel  in  color,  the  ear  in  sweet  sounds, 
and  music  and  painting  with  tl:eir  subjective  laws  are 
in  every  man  embryonic;  the  skillful  hand  delio^hts 
in  its  skill,  and  art,  whose  end  is  in  itself,  graces  not 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  1 25 

Statuary  and  architecture  only,  but  every  utilitarian 
service  which  is  but  the  means  to  an  end ;  and  every 
natural  turn  or  talent  of  the  mind,  craving  its  proper 
exercise,  finds  satisfaction  in  its  own  perfect  work 
independently  of  the  ulterior  or  utilitarian  or  self- 
regarding  aim.  And  the  finer  the  capacity  the  more 
unselfish  or  impersonal  its  action.  The  stronger  the 
genius  or  passion,  relatively  to  the  personal  interest, 
the  more  it  tends  to  subdue  or  ignore  all  ends  but  the 
gratification  of  its  craving  for  complete  or  ideal  ex- 
pression. Hence  we  are  all,  all  at  least  who  are 
conscious  of  any  spark  of  originality,  idealists.  Ever}^ 
ambition  is  an  ideal,  and  only  such  as  are  destitute 
of  any  native  aspiration,  whose  mental  life  is  but  the 
reflex  response  to  the  stimulus  of  other  minds,  are 
inaccessible  to  the  force  of  ideal  motives.  It  is  the 
devotion  to  narrow  and  perverted  ideals,  not  any  gen- 
eral incapacity'  to  subordinate  the  act  to  the  idea, 
that  in  the  main  of  mankind  corrupts  the  purpose 
and  disorganizes  the  life  of  the  soul.  Even  the  crim- 
inal and  the  desperado  have  a  standard  of  shrewd- 
ness and  daring  wh.ich  they  respect,  and  meet  their 
punishment  sometimes  wiih  the  fine  resilience  of  a 
manly  spirit. 

"Sae  rantingly,  sae  wantonly, 

Sae  dauntingly  gaed   he; 
He  played  a  spring,  and  danced  it  round. 

Beneath  the  gallows-tree.'' 

And  so  the  various  aims  pursued  in  business,  in  po- 
litics, in  social  life,  aims  not  less  repulsive,  often,  to 
a  true  social  feeliim  or  less  hostile  to  the  social  in- 
tcrest  than  is  the  violence   of   the   outlaw,    represent 


126  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

ideals  for  the  sake  of  which  men  will  sacrifice  safety, 
ease,  enjoyment,  all  that  is  most  potent  to  seduce  the 
will.  The  power  of  the  imagination  to  project  and 
keep  figured  before  the  mind  a  form  or  idea  of  the 
acts  indispensable  to  the  perfect  achievement  of  the 
work  undertaken,  apart  from  ordinary  personal  con- 
siderations, is  not  limited  to  the  few  who  in  an  artis- 
tic or  special  sense  are  recognized  as  men  of 
imaginative  minds.  It  is  a  power  which,  in  some 
degree,  one  might  say,  is  inseparable  from  the  human 
outfit.  Dimly  or  distinctly  there  is  mirrored  to  each 
man's  mind,  during  the  formative  period  at  least,  the 
manner  of  man  he  would  be — strong  or  brave  or 
wise  or  rich  or  good — and  the  ideals  thus  formed, 
varying  according  to  the  structure  of  the  mind  or  the 
influence  under  which  it  falls,  react  upon  all  its  aims 
and  affinities  and  form  or  deform  the  general  conduct 
of  life. 

There  is  little  weight,  therefore,  in  any  objection 
urged  on  the  ground  of  the  insensibilit}^  of  the  mind 
to  ideal  influences  generall}^  The  difliculty  lies  in 
shaping  our  ideals  in  accordance  with  a  juster  esti- 
mate of  vital  good.  And  this  difficulty  lies  deep  in 
our  nature.  From  the  beginning  there  is  dispropor- 
tion or  bias  in  the  structure  of  the  mind,  and  there- 
fore in  the  configuration  of  its  ideals;  and  education 
must  strike  deep  into  the  substance  of  the  life  to 
correct  its  bias  and  mold  it  to  a  truer  form.  The 
discipline  of  the  race,  however,  shows  a  progress. 
The  true  law  has  a  yet  deeper  organic  basis  than  the 
false,  is  in  fact  truer  because  it  is   deeper.     The   de- 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  I 27 

sire  for  a  deeper,  a  less  qualified  satisfaction  with 
the  results  of  life,  for  a  profounder  harmony  of  the 
vital  elements,  is  a  fundamental  desire,  and  is  at  the 
bottom  of  our  very  discontent;  and  this  rooted  de- 
sire, appearing  in  ease  and  in  dis-easc,  through  our 
dissatisfacti(jn  or  through  our  content,  must  tend, 
while  the  soul  has  freedom  to  act  and  intelligence  to 
meditate  upon  the  result  of  its  acts,  to  promote  a 
juster  appreciation  of  spiritual  values  and  abetter  ad- 
justment of  our  elTorts  to  our  ultimate  end.  Selfish- 
ness itself  learns  to  discipline  its  forces,  and  frames 
for  itself  a  contracted  or  distorted  ideal;  and  the 
ofllce  of  religion,  as  here  conceived,  is  not  to  ex- 
punge all  ccjmmon  motives,  or  to  inject  some  novel 
principle  into  our  nature,  but  to  broaden  our  appre- 
hension of  the  actual  capacities  of  life,  harmonize 
its  present  interests, enlarge  and  purify  existing  ideals, 
and  fire  the  imagination  vvitli  some  glimpses  of  a  re- 
mote, and  for  us  perhaps  unattainable,  ideal.  The 
process  is  necessarily  slow,  but  it  is  continuous  with 
processes  already  well  advanced.  It  is  the  process,  in 
fact,  which  religion  has  always,  since  its  alliance 
with  morals,  inulertaken  to  accelerate;  and  natural 
idealism,  as  a  j")hilosoj:)hy  of  religion,  is  but  an  at- 
tempt to  rt'fi'r  religion,  as  a  permanent  force  in 
human  development,  to  a  natural  basis,  and  to 
strengtlien  it,  by  harmonizing  it  with  natural  law,  for 
.     the  performance  of  its  proper  work 


X. 

Our  remedies  oft  in  ourselves  do  lie, 
Which  we  ascribe  to  heaven:   the  fated  sky 
Gives  us  free  scope;  only  doth  backward  pull 
Our  slow  designs  when  we  ourselves  are  dull. 

— Shakespeare. 

0  Power,  more  near  my  life  than  life  itself 

1  fear  not  Thy  withdrawal;  more  I  fear 

Seeing,  to  know  Thee  not,  hoodwinked  with  dreams 
Of  signs  and  v.^onders,  while  unnoticed,  Thou 
Walking  Thy  garden  still,  commun'st  with  men, 
Missed  in  the  commonplace  of  miracle. 

— Lowell. 

Thus  the  mind,  estranged  from  nature  by  an  in- 
veterate tendency  to  objectify  or  personify  its  own 
abstractions,  comes  back  in  alTectionate  reverence  to 
her,  our  Alma  Mater.  And  nothing  that  touched 
the  deeper  feeling  or  the  finer  sense  is  lost.  But 
nature,  no  longer  the  mere  premiss  from  which  we 
conclude  the  being  of  infinite  power,  is  herself  the 
power,  and  herself  awakens  the  emotions  which, 
conceiving  of  nature  in  a  mechanic  sense,  we  have 
regarded  as  the  soul's  recognition  of  deity  conceived 
as  an  exterior  and  supra-natural  mechanician.  Deity 
is  immanent,  rather,  the  spirit  of  the  ideal,  actual  and 
operative  in  nature.  The  vastness  and  perfection  of 
her  works,  the  immutability  of  her  laws,  her  imper- 
ishable energy  and  life,  in  fine,  all  that  was  ever 
read  in  evidence  of  the  being  and  attributes  of  a  dis- 
sociated deity,  all  that  natural  theology,  basing  itself 

128 


NATURE    AND    DEITY 


129 


on  that  natural  religious  feeling  of  which  the  sweet 
and  reverent  spirit  is  conscious  in  the  presence  of 
nature,  turns  to  theological  use,  remains  as  the  ex- 
pression and  evidence  of  nature's  own  divinity.  Na- 
ture in  her  own  character  and  right  embodies  the 
manifold  good  which  we  have  conceived  as  hers  by 
mere  reflection  and  contingence,  or  have  interpreted 
as  an  index  only  of  the  perfections  of  her  designer. 
That  is  to  say,  in  nature  herself,  and  in  nature  alone, 
need  we  search  for  the  divine. 

But,  mindful  of  the  infinity  of  natural  being,  we 
shall  guard  against  making  a  transcendental  use  of 
our  predicates  or  ascribing  determinate  attributes  to 
the  indeterminable  universality,  lest  we  fall  again 
into  the  perplexities  and  contradictions  of  theology. 
Our  characterizations  of  nature  are  relative  always 
to  the  spirit  or  purpose  or  idea  in  which  we  contem- 
plate the  being  of  nature.  Nor  can  the  mind,  shift- 
ing its  points  of  view,  by  successive  approaches 
exhaust  its  field,  or  sum  up  the  qualities  of  being  in 
a  series  of  supreme  determinate  attributes.  We  find, 
if  we  venture  the  attempt,  that  our  language,  as  our 
thought,  loses  in  content  what  it  gains  in  generality. 
We  generalize  only  by  abstraction  of  quality.  And 
in  the  highest  gcuieralization — being — all  quality  or 
attributive  force  disappears,  save  as  there  may  be 
reserved  in  the  term  certain  faint  traces  of  the  attri- 
butes it  has  drojiju^d,  or  some  implication  that  being 
cannot  be  conceived  save  as  in  cjualitative  relation 
with  the  mind  which  conceives  it.  luit  a  relation  or 
an  attribute  of  tenuity  so    extremes    has    no  ruligious 


130  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

value.  The  aspects  of  nature  which  appeal  to  relig- 
ious feeling,  though  the}^  must  be  broad  enough  to 
direct  the  mind  from  the  individual  toward  the  uni- 
versal, should  yet  be  sufliciently  determinate  to  be 
conceived  and  felt  in  their  qualitative  character.  We 
cannot  worship  a  bare  abstraction.  Nor  can  the  re- 
ligious sense  rest  in  any  merely  negative  aspect  of 
being,  as  the  Un-conscious,  the  Un-knowable.  Such 
negations  may  have  a  temporary  use  in  correcting 
a  certain  bias  or  false  emphasis  of  religious  thought, 
too  dogmatic,  often,  and  too  overweening  in  its  as- 
sumption of  knowledge;  but  whatever  their  schematic 
value,  as  religious  concepts  they  are  sterile.  That 
there  is  somewhat  of  being  which  we  do  not,  or 
which  we  can  not,  know;  that  our  human  conscious 
thought  is  not  the  thought,  if  thought  we  may  call  it, 
which  is  expressed  in  the  order  and  beauty  of  the 
Cosmos;  may,  as  propositions,  be  true,  and  of  serious 
import,  perhaps,  in  denial  of  a  false  or  an  overstrained 
theor}^  But  there  is  no  inspiration  in  a  mere  priv- 
ative or  negative.  Negation,  though  it  may  correct 
an  error,  inhibits,  as  mere  denial,  the  sympathetic 
and  unifying  impulse  in  which  religion  is  founded, 
and  tends,  by  emphasizing  difference  rather  than 
similarity,  to  alienate  us  from  nature.  The  vital 
concepts  in  religion  are  positive  concepts.  Religion 
dwells,  not  in  ditlerence  or  disruption  or  denial,  not 
in  the  thought  of  self  and  its  demarcations  from  the 
general  being  of  nature,  but  in  the  consciousness  of 
the  union  of  our  individual  life  with  the  universal  life. 
I'Icnce    religious    language    is   inevitably   personal. 


NATURE    AND    DEITY  I3I 

The  characters  which  the  religious  mind  must  con- 
template in  nature  are  those  in  virtue  of  which  na- 
ture may  be  feU,  if  not  adequate!}'  defined,  as  a 
personal  life  in  intimate  contact  with  our  human 
personality.  The  religious  impulse  is  thus  the  poetic 
impulse  in  its  most  aeneralized  form.  As  the  liter- 
ary  spirit,  most  completely  represented  in  poetrj^ 
generalizes  individual  feeling  and  gives  it  universal 
form,  searching  for  the  touch  of  nature  which  makes 
the  whole  world  kin,  so  the  religious  spirit  general- 
izes all  being,  and  searches  the  universe  with  sympa- 
thetic eyes  for  vivid  expression  of  all  that  is  kindred 
with  itself  in  the  universal  life. 

And  matters  are  much  simplified  when  the  search 
for  deity  is  thus  shifted  from  some  timeless  and  space- 
less realm — wliatever  that  may  mean — to  the  realm 
of  nature,  and  the  divine  attributes,  of  which  nature 
is  the  evidence,  are  found  in  nature  herself  who  offers 
the  evidence.  In  contemplating  deit}^  as  immanent 
in  nature  religious  thought  approaches  its  object  more 
directly,  and  more  intelligently',  we  may  presume, 
since  nature  is  always  present  to  correct  the  extrava- 
gance and  inconsistencies  of  our  thought.  Willi  the 
eternal  reality  ever  before  us,  transcending  the  capac- 
ity of  our  language  as  of  our  thought,  we  shall  not 
read  the  attril)ules  of  our  human  personalitv,  in  their 
specific  character  as  human,  into  tlie  general  being 
of  nature* ;  and,  abandoning  the  attempt  to  interjiret 
universal  law  as  the  expression  of  an  ailiitrary  per- 
sonal will,  we  shall  cease  to  br  vexed  by  the  contra- 
dictions inherent  in  such  an  intcM'pretation    and  in  all 


132  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

our  efforts  to  define  the  infinite  through  the  determin- 
able attributes  of  the  finite.  We  may  dwell  on  the 
analogies  between  nature  and  human  nature,  on  the 
essential  unity  of  the  life  which  binds  humanity  to 
the  beincf  of  nature — which  is  all  that  is  demanded 
by  religious  feeling — but  the  ends  of  our  human  na- 
ture will  not  be  assigned  as  the  ends  of  universal 
nature,  or  as  furnishing  a  measure  or  standard  to 
which  all  her  operations  must  be  assumed  to  conform. 
Our  peculiar  impressibility,  our  interests  and  our 
aspirations,  though  the  ultimate  ground  from  which 
we  derive  all  rules  for  self-direction  as  human  beings 
and  all  standards  of  preference  in  respect  of  the  in- 
finite content  of  nature,  impose  neither  form  nor  lim- 
itation upon  being  universal.  The  human  spirit, 
trying  all  things  by  its  peculiar  touch,  chooses,  con- 
templates, assimilates,  in  virtue  of  laws  peculiar  to 
its  nature;  and  that  which  we  cannot  convert  to  our 
uses,  which  offends  our  human  sense,  or  which 
clashes  with  our  human  aims,  we  may  leave,  if  we 
must,  unappropriated,  unassimilated,  unharmonized, 
as  elements  of  a  universe  which,  while  it  includes 
our  humanity,  includes  also  an  infinity  which  trans- 
cends our  humanit}^  The  necessity  of  resolving  away 
all  infelicities,  all  discord,  all  that  mocks  our  human 
sentiment,  is  gratuitous  and  self-imposed.  It  is  the 
mere  implication  of  a  theory.  And  the  mind,  re- 
lieved of  the  necessity,  imposed  by  such  a  theory,  of 
interpreting  all  things  in  a  predetermined  sense,  is 
free  to  look  at  nature  as  she  is- — to  take  the  facts  as 
it  finds  them — constrained  by  no  pious   obligation  to 


NATURE  AND  DEITY  I33 

call  evil  good,  bat  inwardly  impelled  in  all  evil  to 
search  out  the  good,  that  is,  to  discover  in  nature, 
or  to  create  of  the  substance  of  nature,  that  which 
responds  to  our  human  ideals.  This  is  the  sum  of 
our  life;  and  this  should  suffice.  Man,  his  interests, 
the  laws  of  his  being,  are  finite;  nature,  as  the  gen- 
eral medium  and  ground  of  being,  of  all  that  is 
individual  and  specific,  is  herself  neither  individual 
nor  specific,  but  infinite. 

Nor  need  we  fear,  searching  for  divinity  in  the 
domain  of  nature,  to  miss  the  strengthening  and  cur- 
ative power  of  which  religion  has  professed  to  know 
the  source.  Certain  rankling  reflections,  moreover, 
which  paternalism  provokes  do  notarise  in  the  natur- 
alistic view.  From  a  personal  providence  we  ask 
the  tenderness  of  personal  consideration.  But  the 
sternness  of  the  general  conditions  of  life,  the  com- 
monness of  misfortune,  failure,  pain,  tend  to  strain 
men's  confidence  in  parental  and  providential  care, 
and  to  instill  in  all  but  the  sweetest  natures  a  lurkintr 
resentment  fatal  to  repose  and  spiritual  strength. 
And  even  wr.ere  such  confidence  is  complete,  the 
habit  of  interpreting  the  severities  of  lift?  as  within 
the  scope  of  an  overruling  personal  intention,  which 
must  necessarily  include  compensation  or  personal 
amends,  cannot  be  so  favorable  to  firmness  of  moral 
fiber  as  the  habit  of  frankly  accepting  the  inevitable 
as  so  far  final.  The  theistic  hypothesis,  in  fact,  by 
encouraging  the  demand  for  an  arbitrary  relaxation 
of  the  harsher  condilit)ns  of  life,  tends,  in  a  tlegree, 
to  demoralize  the  mind.      It  puts  us   at   a  false  point 


134  NATURE  AND  DEITY 

of  view.  Suggesting  to  our  importunity  the  means 
of  supplementing  or  overriding  the  operation  of  nat- 
ural law,  it  leads  to  a  view  of  thefactsof  life  as  tran- 
sitory, provisional,  and  in  a  sense  unreal:  we  reserve 
the  right,  if  nature  seems  unkind,  to  appeal  from 
nature  to  the  author  of  nature.  But  naturalism,  see- 
ing in  nature  the  sole  and  universal  reality,  accepts 
her  laws  and  the  whole  discipline  and  circumstance 
of  life  in  earnest,  and  inspired  with  a  serious  present 
purpose  to  use  the  present  opportunit}-,  or  to  crea  e 
its  opportunity',  fosters  the  growth  of  a  cheerful  and 
resolute  manhood. 

And  nature,  rude  as  is  her  chiding,  is  full  of  ben- 
efit. Though  by  tears  and  supplications  she  cannot 
be  constrained  to  swerve  by  the  smallest  aberration 
from  her  course, she  works  ungrudgingl}-, untiringly, 
with  him  who  allies  himself  to  her  laws.  For  loss 
of  any  good  she  offers  other  good.  But  her  indem- 
nities are  not  for  the  supine  and  fearful.  And  neither 
piet}^  nor  goodness  may  ignore  the  conditions  she 
imposes,  or  idly  presume  on  her  favor.  She  demands 
of  us  the  willing  hand,  the  docile  mind,  the  skill 
which  discipline  teaches.  Her  gift  to  us  is  opportu- 
nity. We  have  assumed,  too  lightl}^,  that  nature  is  a 
scheme  which  but  centers  in  man,  who  may  with 
justice  feel  himself  aggrieved  if  in  the  individual 
case  fate  seems  harsh.  Nature  is,  rather,  a  field  of 
infinite  possibility^  offered  to  man,  not  as  his  sole 
prerogative  or  birthright,  but  to  him  with  all  the  off- 
spring of  nature,  and  to  him  effectively  only  as  he 
has  the  courage  or  address   to  use  the  proffered   ad- 


NATURE  AND  DEITY  1 35 

vantage.      The  personal    obligation    to   deal    with  us 
graciously,  which  we  would  read  into  the  scheme  of 
things,  attaches  only  to  our  theories  of  personal  gov- 
ernment, theories  founded  in   the  constitution    of  hu- 
manity and  inconsequently  applied  to  the  constitution 
of  nature  universal.      There  is  no  debt  to  us  from  na- 
ture.     Our  wisdom  is  to  take  witliout  cavil  the  good 
that  she  otiers — to  take  it  as  a  gift.    Nature  is  before 
us;  awaits  us.    She  is  under  no  pledge  to  our  desires; 
but  her  store  is  inexhaustible,  and    if   we  have  willed 
the  unattainable,  or  suffered  loss  that  seems  irrepara- 
ble, she  still  awaits  us;   we  are  yet  free   to  choose  of 
her  gifts.      The  soul's  attitude  is  ever  the  main    mat- 
ter.     If  the  spirit  be  yet   alive    and    tender,  nature's 
mere  presence  is   consolation.      There   is  life  in    the 
touch  of  light   and    air;    sanatory    influence   exhales 
from  the  soil;  the  very  grass   at   our   feet   is   full    of 
healing.      And  the  soul  may  be   nourished    even    on 
disaster.      Borne  in  upon  itself,  it  has  leisure  then  to 
disengage   essential   good   from    the   specious    hopes 
wliich  distract  the  purposes  and  eat  up  the  energy  of 
life;  and  the  futile  personal  will,  reconciled  at  length 
with  the  eternal    will,  discovers    its  allinity    with    all 
devout  and  inward-looking    minds    that    have   pene- 
trated the  shows  of  life  and  laid  hold  upon  its  verities. 
It  is  well,  we  may  feel  then,  that  nature  should  know 
no  deviation  or  bias.      Were  she  less    constant   there 
were  less  aiound  for  the  Stoic's  couraife,  tlie    Chris- 
tian's  self-surrender,  tlu>  Pnulclliist's  calm.   The  fretful 
soul    would    change    the    unchangeable.      Our    pt^'tty 
egoism  demands  of  the    inexorable  personal  conces- 


136  NATURE    AND    DEITY 

sion,  and  relaxation  of  the  chain  which    binds   each 
effect  to  its  cause.   But  riper  wisdom,  rapt  by  glimpses 
of  the  infinite  life  from  which  our  finite  life  proceeds, 
stills  our  repining,  and  is  content   that  universal  be- 
ing shall  follow  stable  and  universal  laws. 


THE  END. 


'Jriifl^Hit 


M\ 


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